The program was sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America together with Pathfinder Press, the book’s publisher, and Eastwind Books of San Francisco.

The audience of 180 people brought together students, workers, academic figures, and activists in Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino-American organizations. Some 40 percent of the audience were of Asian origin, and translation into Cantonese and Spanish was available for the entire program.

Originally scheduled to take place at the Historical Society itself, the event was clearly going to be too large for those premises, so organizers shifted it across the street to the historic Gordon J. Lau elementary school. That nearly 150-year-old institution was long known as “The Chinese School,” since for many decades Chinese students were not allowed to attend any other public school in San Francisco.

Speaking on the panel were L. Ling-chi Wang, professor emeritus and former head of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley; documentary filmmaker Felicia Lowe; Steve Wake, a leader of the Japanese-American organization Tsukimi Kai; and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of Our History Is Still Being Written and president of Pathfinder Press.

Waters brought greetings to the meeting from the three Chinese-Cuban authors and presented a copy of the book signed by each of them to the Chinese Historical Society of America. Gimmy Park Li, a well-known San Francisco radio personality who chaired the panel, accepted the autographed copy on behalf of the society.

As with other events sponsored by the historical society, the meeting had been publicized by an attractively designed color postcard—this one in a run of 2,000, featuring the cover of the book. Leaflets in English, Spanish, and Chinese were distributed in Chinatown, on area campuses, and at local factories and other workplaces.  
 
‘What can be learned’
“Through this book we can learn about the history of Chinese in Cuba,” said Ling-chi Wang, the opening speaker, who had met the three authors when he helped organize a conference on Chinese in Latin America at the University of Havana in l999.

“We can learn a lot about the Cuban revolution,” he said, “and we can learn a lot about the Cuban role in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism.”

Wang pointed to the importance of the Chinese Historical Society sponsoring an event that looks at the Chinese in the United States as part of the broader Chinese diaspora in some l40 countries. “Most people think that San Francisco Chinatown was the first Chinatown in the Americas,” he said, “when in fact the one in Havana was established first.”

Between l847 and 1874 approximately 200,000 Chinese were “recruited” and transported to Cuba as indentured laborers, Wang explained. Many, in fact, were “shanghaied,” he said—pointing to the origins of that expression—and taken to Cuba by force. In the l870s thousands more Chinese came to Cuba from North America “during the mounting anti-Chinese agitation against the presence of Chinese in the United States.”

Wang was referring to what was often called the “yellow peril” campaigns, organized by the bosses and supported by the skilled-trades union bureaucracy and the large right wing of the Socialist Party in the United States.

The Chinese in Cuba played an important role in two revolutions, Wang said: the wars of independence from Spain in the 19th century, and the revolution that brought down the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in the l950s.

Wang noted that next year will be the 160th anniversary of the arrival of the first shiploads of Chinese indentured laborers in Cuba. He invited those interested to join him in the activities being organized in Cuba to commemorate this event.

Wang pointed out that unlike the racist treatment still experienced by Chinese in many countries, including the United States, the generals explain in Our History Is Still Being Written how “only under the kind of socialist revolution in Cuba were the Chinese able to succeed in achieving equality, real equality.”

All three generals speak “very passionately” about their participation in the second Cuban revolution, Wang said, as well as in the struggle against colonialism and imperialism, especially in Africa. By reading the book, he said, including Nelson Mandela’s speech when the South African leader visited Havana in 1991, you can see the Cuban sacrifices and contributions “to getting rid of the apartheid system.” The three Chinese-Cuban generals “participated and played very key roles in those efforts in Africa.”  
 
Video from Havana’s Chinatown
Video footage of Havana’s Chinatown was shown by filmmaker Felicia Lowe from her forthcoming documentary, Chinese Couplet. Lowe has traveled to Cuba twice trying to find out more about her grandfather who migrated from China to Cuba in the 1920s and stayed there for 15 years.

Cubans of Chinese descent and others are working to revitalize Havana’s Chinatown, Lowe said in her remarks introducing the film clips. There is an interest in Chinese culture, reflected in classes on the Chinese language as well as the practice of martial arts.

“It’s an interesting notion,” she said, that in “a socialist society where race presumably is not an issue, that there is a lot of pride expressed by those who say, ‘I had a Chinese grandfather,’ or that somebody down the road is Chinese.”

Steve Wake explained that Tsukimi Kai has organized trips to Cuba by Japanese-Americans to establish contact with Cubans of Japanese ancestry. He described the impact visiting Cuba had on him, showing what human solidarity makes possible.

Following Pearl Harbor and Washington’s declaration of war against Japan, Wake said, adult males from the small Japanese community in Cuba were rounded up and incarcerated by the Batista regime on the Isle of Pines. This was carried out even before the U.S. government sent Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of the United States to concentration camps, he noted.

“In Cuba soldiers actually went to Japanese homes and dragged away the men,” Wake said. But the Japanese in Cuba received a lot of solidarity from ordinary Cubans. “Many of the Japanese women who had been left to fend for themselves received help from their Cuban neighbors.” Cubans of Japanese origin later participated in the revolutionary struggle against Batista, he said.

In the lively discussion period after the talks, Wake described what he learned in Cuba about the contrast between the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, where many lives were lost unnecessarily, and how the government and people in Cuba—which “is not a rich country”—organize to prevent loss of life in hurricanes.  
 
How the book came about
Mary-Alice Waters described how Our History Is Still Being Written came about. Like its three authors, she said, it had “a humble beginning.”

Over the past 15 years, Waters said, Pathfinder has published an increasing number of books built around interviews with men and women in Cuba “who have weighty responsibilities in the government, armed forces, leadership of women’s organizations,” and other tasks. One thing all these Cuban revolutionists “have in common is that they came from that generation of young people, students and workers, who in the early 1950s—most of them still in their teens—simply refused to accept and bow down before the indignities and brutalities of a military coup carried out by General Batista,” a dictatorship backed by Washington.

“That was the generation that Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong were part of,” she said. When she first met Chui—a leader of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution—and learned a little bit about his history, they discussed doing an interview. “‘I have an even better idea,’ he suggested. There are three generals of Chinese ancestry in the Revolutionary Armed Forces, Chui said. ‘Let’s make it an interview with the three of us.’ And the book grew from there.”

The generation of Cubans who made the revolution in the 1950s, Waters said, fought for land reform, to end racism, to eliminate illiteracy, to provide employment for everyone. In the process, they defended themselves against assaults by U.S. economic interests and against the efforts to block such measures by Cubans who owned the land and factories. “Working people in Cuba simply refused to cede to these interests and kept driving ahead. That was the beginning of the socialist revolution in our hemisphere and the source of the implacable hostility to Cuba by the U.S. government,” a hostility that continues to this day.

Waters pointed to comments in the book by General Sío Wong about the 1999 conference of overseas Chinese held in Havana that Ling-chi Wang had described. Some participants there had asked what was different in Cuba that allowed individuals of Chinese ancestry like themselves to become generals and assume the kinds of leadership responsibilities they were shouldering there. “And Sío Wong’s reply was that it was the socialist revolution that made this possible,” she said. “That’s what distinguishes the Chinese community in Cuba from those in the rest of Latin America.”

Waters said that Our History Is Still Being Written also helps those who read it get more interested in our own history here in the United States—“the history of the Chinese and other Asian exclusion acts of the 1880s and 1920s, the property exclusions, the pogroms, the laws against intermarriage, the head taxes. Above all, we learn about the resistance against these brutal forms of racism and exploitation, resistance that is part of a proud tradition of struggles by working people in the United States.

“This book is not just about the past,” Waters said. “It’s about the present and it’s about the future. It’s about understanding the past in order to be able to act today and tomorrow.” That’s why the book is important here in the United States, where Pathfinder has published it in English and Spanish, she said.

Waters’s announcement that a Chinese translation is now under way, with plans for publication in 2007, was greeted with enthusiastic applause.

“The book’s purpose is not to understand Cuba and the Cuban revolution alone, but to understand ourselves, our own history, and our future,” Waters explained. “It’s about the millions of us who are in the streets today demonstrating and demanding legalization for all immigrants. It’s about the working people of this country. Who we are, where we came from, why we are growing in numbers and strength, and why we’re not going away.”  
 
In the audience
A number of prominent individuals in the audience were introduced by chairwoman Gimmy Park Li. Among them was Him Mark Lai, “the father of Chinese-American history.” Lai is adjunct professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University and author of Chinese-American Voices, among other books. Also introduced were Judy Yung, author of Unbound Voices, Unbound Feet and other works; Chizu Iiyama, former vice president of the National Japanese American Historical Society; and Jim Hirabayashi, former chair of Ethnic Studies at U.C. Berkeley.

After the program participants continued the discussion at a reception back at the Chinese Historical Society. Thirty-three copies of Our History Is Still Being Written were sold by the society’s bookshop, including eight in Spanish. Many enjoyed the displays of photographs and drawings from the book, reviews it has received, and photos of the Tsukimi Kai visit to Cuba. Participants also visited the historical society’s museum featuring the history of Chinese in the Americas, including a special exhibit on the effects of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake on Chinatown.

A photo and article on the meeting appeared in the September 10 issue of Ming Pao, San Francisco’s main Chinese-language daily (see illustration on p. 6).
 
 
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