Vol. 71/No. 13      April 2, 2007

Prior to the meeting Yuen gave Mary-Alice Waters, the editor of the book, a tour of the Asian Library. It has the largest collection of Asian-language materials in Canada.

Our History Is Still Being Written is published by Pathfinder Press and is based on interviews with Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong, all three of whom are brigadier generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces.

“In reading this book I was immediately struck by the title,” Yuen remarked. Chinese have been discriminated against all over the world, she said, but they seem to have made significant progress in Cuba.

She quoted the closing words of the interview with Sío Wong—“A better world is possible. But only with a socialist revolution.” She added, “I want to know more about this.”

About one third of the audience were of Asian descent, including students and others who came from off campus. Some noted they had come to the meeting at UBC because they had been unable to get to the previous day's meeting at the Vancouver Public Library, which drew 300 people. Many, like Yuen, wanted to find out more about the history of Chinese immigration in the Americas. The meeting was sponsored by the Asian Library, Latin American Studies at UBC, Pathfinder Books, and Perspectives, an English-Chinese student newspaper at UBC.

Speakers on the panel included Allan Cho, editor-in-chief of Perspectives; Karin Lee, award winning filmmaker who made Canadian Steel: Chinese Grit, the story of the Chinese workers who built the Canadian Pacific Railroad; Henry Yu, who is an associate professor both in the UBC History Department and in Asian American Studies at the University of California in Los Angeles; and Waters, who is also president of Pathfinder Press.

Both Lee and Yu are also board members of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of British Columbia.

Cho explained that he and the other student volunteers at Perspectives “were intrigued by the book when we first learned about it.” The fact that the three generals, Choy, Chui, and Sío Wong, were “the same age as us” when they made the revolution—like most of those involved in overthrowing the Batista dictatorship—“struck a chord,” he said.

Cho said they were also attracted to the fact that the Cuban Revolution was an “outlet for dealing with racial oppression.” He called attention to the review of Our History Is Still Being Written by Johnson Chan, the English-language editor of Perspectives, available in the paper's current issue. A number of people picked up a copy at the display table.

Karin Lee told the meeting that when she learned about the book she changed her plans to visit Cuba as a tourist and instead went to investigate the possibility of making a film that would tell the fascinating story of the Chinese-Cubans.

“I found it interesting that when Chinese-Canadians were fighting for [their rights] that Chinese-Cubans were fighting to overthrow the Batista dictatorship,” Lee said. She was particularly interested when they told her about the all-Chinese volunteer militia organized in 1960 to advance and defend the revolution.

Historian Henry Yu talked about the origins of the Chinese-Cuban community in the middle of the 19th century. They were brought to Cuba by Spain, that country’s colonial master, because it had been forced to curtail the African slave trade.

“The Chinese worked as contract labor—the indentured labor system which replaced slavery," he said. "It was one of the most violent and brutal forms of labor as the sugar plantation owners literally worked you to death. They had no interest in keeping you alive” beyond the years of the contract, as they did with slaves who were their property, Yu continued.

“What happened to the millions of Chinese that went around the world often under similar conditions?” Yu asked. “What is their story? I like the title of the book, Our History Is Still Being Written, because their story is still being written from below” by the very people who made and are still making history.

One central fact is woven throughout these interviews, Waters explained. How the measures taken by the popular revolutionary government headed by Fidel Castro and carried out by the armed workers and peasants themselves eradicated institutionalized racism and eliminated the property relations on which it is built. In doing so, they opened the way to effectively wage the more difficult fight against all manifestations of racist prejudice.

“As Moisés Sío Wong puts it so forcefully,” Waters said, “the greatest measure taken against discrimination ‘was the revolution itself.’ The Chinese community in Cuba is different from Peru, Brazil, Argentina, or Canada, he emphasized. And that difference is the triumph of a socialist revolution.”

Two students, Kaitlynn and Tara, told the Militant that they came to the meeting because they wanted to find out about Cuba and socialism.
 
 
Related articles:
Australia event promotes ‘Our History Is Still Being Written’
Event held in Montreal on book on Chinese-Cubans in the Cuban Revolution  
 
 
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