The library, which sponsored the meeting, is one of the busiest in San Francisco and a longtime center of cultural activity and exchange of ideas in Chinatown. It has a large collection of books in Chinese.

The library staff publicized the meeting with flyers in English and Chinese. Several young people in the audience had learned of the event from leaflets distributed outside the library, or from an announcement over the library loudspeaker just before the program began. The entire meeting, attended by 75 people, was translated into both Cantonese and Spanish.

Chinatown librarian Sally Wong chaired the meeting and introduced panelists Bernard Wong, a professor of anthropology at San Francisco State University; documentary filmmaker Felicia Lowe; James Hirabayashi, chief program advisor for the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles and former dean of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State; Milton Chee, a rail worker who helps produce and distribute Pathfinder Press titles; and Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder and editor of Our History Is Still Being Written.

Lowe and Bernard Wong had both participated in a 1999 international conference on the Chinese diaspora held in Havana, Cuba. Hirabayashi had visited Cuba in 2000 for a festival in Santiago de Cuba focusing on African influence in the Caribbean. All three described how their visits had helped awaken them to the weight and importance of the contributions of Chinese-Cubans, which, they stressed, are often little-known.

“We don’t know exactly how many Chinese people there are in Cuba,” Wong said, citing the history of intermarriage and integration of Chinese into Cuban society. He explained why so many Chinese emigrated in the 19th and 20th centuries and the interconnections between Chinese communities in different parts of the Americas.

Wong described three waves of Chinese immigration to Cuba, which began in 1847 with thousands of indentured laborers brought by the Spanish colonialists to work the sugar plantations in slave-like conditions. From 1860 to about 1875, more came from the United States, mostly from California, fleeing racist attacks and discriminatory laws. A third wave came from China after 1911 amid the political upheaval, war, and civil war that culminated in the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Among those who arrived in Cuba in the post-World War II years, a good many joined the exodus of wealthy Cuban business people who went to the United States after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in l959.

When he visited Cuba in l999, Wong said, he talked with a number of Chinese-Cubans who had emigrated to Miami and later returned. When asked why, some cited the discrimination and loneliness they had felt, as well as the free health care in Cuba and homes for the elderly that were better than they could afford in the United States.

On display at the meeting were photos and a scrapbook brought by panelist James Hirabayashi from the Caribbean Festival in Santiago. The display included photos of noted Chinese-Cuban painter and historian Pedro Eng, whom Hirabayashi visited during his trip.

Hirabayashi said he met the president of the Japanese-Cuban Association in Cuba, who told him that Japanese do not suffer racism there today. “Because of the racism we suffered during World War II as Japanese Americans, I’m very sensitive to these kind of things,” Hirabayashi said. "I spent some time in a concentration camp." He described how Japanese men in Cuba had also been imprisoned during the war.

Hirabayashi participated in the l969 Third World student strike at San Francisco State University, which united Asians, Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and other students in a fight for an Ethnic Studies Department. When that fight was won, he became the first full-time dean of an Ethnic Studies program in the United States, a responsibility from which he retired only recently.

The meeting began with a slide presentation, narrated by Milton Chee, of photos from Our History Is Still Being Written highlighting the contributions of the three authors—Armando Choy, Moisés Sío Wong, and Gustavo Chui—and the historic events they were part of. All three, Chee noted, have shouldered leadership responsibilities from the time of their involvement in the l959 Cuban Revolution to today.

One slide showed a Havana beach that was for “whites only” before the revolution. “With the victory of the revolution, beaches as well as schools, clinics, and other public facilities were integrated, discrimination in hiring was outlawed, and the fight against racism in all other areas began,” Chee said.

Felicia Lowe, who had spoken at a September 9 presentation of the book hosted here by the Chinese Historical Society of America, showed video footage of interviews with Chinese-Cubans from her forthcoming documentary, Chinese Couplet: El Barrio Chino and My Mother’s Names.

Lowe told of her own family’s experience with racist U.S. laws, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which blocked immigration from China until its repeal in 1943. One of Lowe’s films, Carved in Silence, is the story of Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where from 1910 to 1940 arriving Chinese immigrants were imprisoned and interrogated as part of enforcing the infamous exclusion act.

Lowe’s documentary describes recent efforts by Chinese in Cuba to retain their culture and revitalize Havana’s Chinatown. “The mixed-blood Chinese—because there are very few pure Chinese now—who are taking Mandarin classes, who are learning to read and write and speak Chinese, and who are learning martial arts are very interested in asserting their Chinese cultural identity,” she said. “I found that to be an interesting dynamic—that despite the ideals of socialism, there is still part of each of us that wants to claim we're something special.”

Mary-Alice Waters, who interviewed the three generals featured in Our History Is Still Being Written, had just returned from Caracas, Venezuela, where she had spoken at a panel presentation on the title as part of the Venezuela International Book Fair. A young Chinese-Venezuelan woman who also spoke, Waters noted, had described the racist abuse suffered today by Venezuelans of Asian descent.

“The social and economic status of Asians in Cuba is different from anywhere in the Western Hemisphere,” Waters pointed out. She said that at the l999 conference on the Chinese diaspora, Gen. Sío Wong was asked, “How is it possible that you, a descendent of Chinese, occupy a high government post, are a deputy of the national assembly, a general in the armed forces?”

Sío Wong’s answer was, “Here we had a socialist revolution, a revolution that eliminated discrimination based on the color of a person’s skin, that eliminated the property relations that create not only economic but social inequality between rich and poor. Here the discrimination against Blacks, against Chinese, against women, against the poor was ended. The Chinese community here in Cuba is different from that in Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, and elsewhere. And the difference is a socialist revolution."

“That is the reality you see when you go to Cuba today," Waters said—the integration of Cubans of Chinese descent into every aspect of life in Cuba. “What Felicia was referring to, the pride with which they assert their Chinese heritage and want very much to preserve it, is real. Total integration and the absence of discrimination goes hand in hand with the assertion of pride in who they are, their individuality. And that, I would say, is at the very heart of a real socialist revolution.”

In the discussion period, Gladys Chaw, who had also participated in the l999 Havana conference, was one of the first speakers. “For those who want to look at an endangered species," she said, "I’m a Chinese-Cuban, a ‘chino natural,’ as they say in Cuba, because both my parents were Chinese." Chaw, who came to the United States with her family in 1962 when she was 10 years old, joked that people are always telling her "you don't look Cuban."

“I congratulate you on this book," she said. "I was really very happy to see something from a different perspective about what Chinese-Cubans are doing in Cuba. Because in my research, I haven’t found anything like this. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything they [the Cuban generals] say. After all, I'm here not in Cuba.”

Chaw noted that she was critical of the way Chinatown in Havana was being revitalized. “It’s too gaudy and touristy. It’s too stereotyped,” she said.

The panelists were also asked about sexism and about prejudiced attitudes by some people in Cuba against people with darker skin color.

Waters noted that the Cuban Revolution “has made it possible for women to play an economic and social role, to have a place in society that is qualitatively different from before. The attitudes on relations between men and women have changed dramatically. But they haven’t changed as much as the attitudes on race have.

“The legacy of centuries of racism does not get eliminated overnight,” Waters said, “and you still find many elements of it today. But what has changed, what has been eliminated, is the entire social and economic foundation. And that, more than anything else, is what is reflected in the integration of Chinese in Cuba today.

“As Gladys said, there are very few pure Chinese left in Cuba today. The overwhelming majority of those of Chinese ancestry—hundreds of thousands—are deeply proud of their Chinese ancestry, that they are representative of the Cuban nation: of the strands of history that came together in the forging of the Cuban nation, including the slaves from Africa, the indentured laborers from China, the immigration from Europe.”

The Cuban nation, Waters said, “was forged through the revolutionary struggle for independence from Spain, intertwined with the fight to abolish slavery and indentured labor, and then the successful fight for independence from imperialist domination that was opened by the revolutionary victory of l959.”

The following day, the widely read Chinese-language daily Sing Tao carried a substantial article on the event, with large, color photos of the book and of the meeting.  
 
 
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