Vol. 71/No. 18      May 7, 2007

The meeting was sponsored by the UMass Asian American Studies Program, Africana Studies Department, Latino Studies Program, Asian Student Center, Black Student Center, and Casa Latina, as well as the July 26 Coalition.

Andrew Leong, an Asian American Studies professor at the university who chaired the event, said he had received an e-mail from a student saying he had never known there were Asians in Cuba. That, he noted, underscored the importance of the book.

The other speakers at the meeting were Omar Ocampo, a student and member of Casa Latina; Meizhu Lui, executive director of United for a Fair Economy and coauthor of The Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide; and Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of Our History Is Still Being Written.

Ocampo reviewed the sweep of the story told in the book, from the arrival of 140,000 Chinese in Cuba as indentured laborers in the mid-19th century to the 1959 socialist revolution and beyond.

“The Cuban Revolution eliminated institutionalized discrimination. That allowed the sons of three Chinese immigrants to be government representatives in Cuba,” he said, referring to Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong.

Pointing to the words of Cuban president Fidel Castro quoted on the back cover of the book, “Those not willing to fight for the freedom of others will never be ready to fight for their own,” Ocampo described Cuba’s internationalist solidarity today, from medical volunteers working in Venezuela to its offer to send 1,500 doctors to the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. “These are the principles of the Cuban Revolution,” he said.

“What hit me when I read the book,” said Meizhu Lui, “was the similarity in the family histories of the three generals and my father's and grandfather’s.”

There is a “difference between growing up in Cuba and in the United States, however,” she added. “In Cuba today everyone is included, everyone's capacities are used. In the U.S. they foment divisions.”

Lui referred to the fact that Chinese "were first brought to the East Coast in significant numbers in the 1880s to break a shoe strike.”

Mary-Alice Waters noted that going to school in the United States “almost the only thing you learn about Asian American immigrants in the U.S. is that Chinese labor built the transcontinental railroad and the Japanese on the West Coast were sent to concentration camps during World War II.

“The real history—the exclusion laws, the head taxes, the residency restrictions, the pogroms—but above all the proud history of resistance to these policies, is never mentioned.”

Waters said Pathfinder has published a number of books by Cuban revolutionaries similar to Choy, Chui, and Sío Wong—men and women who, like thousands from their generation, refused to bow down to the brutality of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and began to fight.

After the victory of the Rebel Army in 1959, as they carried out a land reform, launched a massive literacy program, opened the door to greater equality for women, wiped out the scourge of unemployment, and began to eradicate the institutions of racist discrimination, they came into conflict with the propertied interests of the ruling families of Cuba and the United States. They again refused to back down. The economic and military power of the capitalists was broken.

"That was the beginning of the first socialist revolution in the Americas," Waters said, "and to this day that remains the reason for the implacable hostility of the U.S. rulers to the people of Cuba."

In the discussion period, chaired by Terral Ainooson, coordinator of Casa Latina, students asked numerous questions about Cuba today. Nancy Kohn from the July 26 Coalition encouraged people to visit the group’s table for more information about Cuba and the campaign to defend the Cuban Five (see Young Socialists column on page 4). Leong also urged those in the audience to support the fight of the Quincy Four, Asian American youth who were assaulted by cops a year ago and are fighting a police frame-up.
 
 
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