Vol. 71/No. 15      April 16, 2007

Sun is the executive director of the Toronto chapter of the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC), one of the organizations that sponsored the panel discussion, which attracted a packed audience of some 120 people. The national CCNC, the Toronto Free the Cuban Five Committee, the Chinese Magazine of the University of Toronto, and Pathfinder Books also sponsored the event, held at the University of Toronto.

The program started with music, dance, and film. A performance by an Afro-Cuban dance group was followed by two Cantonese opera selections sung by Lai Ching Lau. As Doug Ham, a prominent historian of the Chinese community in Canada, told the audience, Cantonese opera has played an important cultural role among emigrants from China in many parts of the world.

A short clip from the documentary Chinese Restaurants: On the Islands by Chinese Canadian filmmaker Cheuk Kwan introduced the audience to the Chinatown in Havana today.

Laureano Cardoso, the Cuban consul general in Toronto, opened the panel discussion. He and Armando Choy, one of the three generals of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces whose life stories are at the center of the book, were teenagers together in the city of Santa Clara. While there in the 1950s, they became involved in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Cardoso emphasized the integration of Cubans of Chinese ancestry in the revolutionary struggle and in the Rebel Army. He described the monument in Havana dedicated to the Chinese who fought for Cuban independence from Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. “Thousands of Chinese participated in Cuba’s wars of independence,” he noted. “Of these, it is said, there was ‘not a single Chinese Cuban deserter. Not a single Chinese Cuban traitor.’”

Filmmaker Cheuk Kwan noted that the Chinese brought to Cuba as indentured laborers were practically slaves. Kwan described how in Cuba, while working on his documentary, he had found a number of surviving Chinese associations, including one based on those who had emigrated to Cuba from his ancestral village. “I didn’t find many Chinese faces, however. It is as if the Chinese have disappeared. But, in fact, they have been integrated into Cuban society.” There is “a famous saying by a Cuban poet that is very true,” he remarked. “Cubans are one part Chinese, one part Spanish and one part Black.”

Colleen Hua, national president of the Chinese Canadian National Council, said the history of the Chinese in Cuba was “something I didn’t know about before I read the book.” She quoted the answer given by one of the generals, Moíses Sío Wong, to a question about why the Chinese in Cuba are not targets of discrimination as they are elsewhere in the Americas. “What’s the difference in the experience of Chinese in Cuba and other countries of the diaspora? The difference is that here a socialist revolution took place. The revolution eliminated discrimination based on the color of a person’s skin. Above all, it eliminated the property relations that create not only economic but also social inequality between rich and poor.”

“This really spoke to me,” Hua said. “Here many of you know of the struggle to get recognition for those who paid the head tax, and their descendents.” Many Chinese were forced to pay a tax of up to $500 each to come to Canada between 1885 and 1923, and then they were virtually excluded until 1947.

Mary-Alice Waters, who interviewed the three generals and edited Our History Is Still Being Written, was the last speaker. She pointed out the importance of the book for readers in Canada and the United States. “Working people in Cuba didn’t consciously start out to make a socialist revolution when they fought to overthrow the Batista dictatorship 50 years ago,” she noted. “They were just determined to build a society with a greater degree of social equality.”

They carried out a land reform, a literacy campaign, reduced unemployment, brought women into the workforce, and put an end to institutionalized racist discrimination against Blacks and Chinese. “As they did this they came into head-on conflict with the ruling families of the United States that owned vast amounts of the productive land and industry in Cuba. The conflict came as Cuban working people simply refused to back down. Men and women like Choy, [Gustavo] Chui, and Sío Wong were ordinary young people who built a new society and in the process transformed themselves.”

Waters pointed out that “the book makes us want to know more about our own history in the U.S. and Canada—not only the exclusion acts, pogroms, and onerous taxes of all kinds, but more importantly the proud history of resistance.” The wide interest in Our History Is Still Being Written, she added, reflects “new winds that are blowing, growing confidence and pride, and new struggles that are on the horizon.”

During the lively discussion period, Ted Chang, a student at Sir Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, asked when the “Chinese had moved out of Cuba.”

Waters replied that the misconception that “there aren’t any Chinese in Cuba anymore” is based on lies fostered by imperialism. “It is true that there are no longer tens of thousands of native-born Chinese in Cuba. There has been little immigration in recent decades. But the fact is there are hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of Cubans of Chinese ancestry. No one knows the exact figure because they are so integrated. That process came about as part of the revolutionary struggle for independence that was intertwined with the struggle for the abolition of slavery and indentured labor in all forms. As part of the revolutionary struggle against U.S. imperialist domination and the Batista dictatorship. As part of the struggle to build a socialist society. That is why Cuba is so deeply different from elsewhere in the Americas.”

In response to another question on the difference between the position of Chinese in Cuba and Canada, Colleen Hua commented that the Chinese in Canada “fought and died for this country” in the Second World War. That is why the Exclusion Act in Canada was repealed in 1947. “Why did they not grant citizenship at that point?” she asked.

In her concluding remarks, Waters noted that the U.S. exclusion act, which was passed in 1882, was similarly repealed in 1943 as a move to bolster the Chiang Kai-shek government of China and Washington’s wartime alliance against Japan. It was not a recognition that Chinese Americans had fought for U.S. imperialism.

Katherine Ng, who is studying human rights in Canada at Ryerson University, said she found the meeting “very informative. I learned about Cuba and the Chinese influence in Cuba and the difference in how Canadians and Cubans treat Chinese.”

Val Pollock, a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union who works at Maple Leaf Pork, said, “It made me want to study more the struggles of different ethnic groups in different countries and learn more about the Chinese in Canada.”

After the meeting participants remained for more than an hour drinking tea and eating Chinese buns as they continued discussing and looking at displays and videos. Participants bought 15 copies of Our History Is Still Being Written in English and Spanish, as well as a dozen other Pathfinder titles. An article with a color photo of the meeting appeared the next day in Sing Tao, one of the main Chinese dailies in Toronto.
 
 
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