The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 72/No. 16      April 21, 2008

 
Miami event held on book
by Chinese Cuban generals
(front page)
 
BY BERNIE SENTER
AND MAGGIE TROWE
 
MIAMI—“What other country can point to greater selflessness than Cuba?” asked Edmund Abaka, a history professor and director of the Africana Studies Program at the University of Miami. “This is detailed so well in the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution.”

Abaka was the chair of an April 6 panel discussion about the book held here and attended by more than 100 people. The book consists of interviews with three Chinese Cubans who joined the 1956-58 revolutionary war that brought down the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba. The three—Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong—all became generals in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces and continue to shoulder important leadership responsibilities today.

As the book describes, Choy, Chui, and Sío Wong each took part in Cuba’s internationalist mission to Angola in the 1970s and 1980s to help beat back an invasion by the South African apartheid regime. The audience here broke into applause when Abaka read a quote from a 1991 speech South African leader Nelson Mandela gave in Cuba.

“The Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the people of Africa,” Mandela said. “The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparalleled for its principled and selfless character.” Excerpts of the speech are included in Our History Is Still Being Written.

The program was held at the Veye-Yo community center. Veye-Yo is a Haitian rights organization based in Miami. Other sponsors included the African-New World Studies Program at Florida International University, and Alianza Martiana, a coalition of groups opposed to Washington’s embargo and travel restrictions against Cuba.

Tony Jeanthenor from Veye-Yo told the crowd, “Cuba went to many places in Africa—Africa with all its diamonds and gold. And the Cubans returned with nothing but their dead. Others who went to Africa took the gold. Cubans returned with their heads held high.”  
 
Anti-Chinese exclusion laws
Winnie Tang, president of the south Florida chapter of the Organization of Chinese Americans, explained that there is a history of the Chinese in the United States that is not told in textbooks. “Chinese Americans face a lot more hardship than most people realize,” she said.

Tang described the 19th century exclusion laws “that prevented our families from joining us over here,” and laws prohibiting immigrants from China, and other countries of Asia, from owning land. These racist measures were written right into the Florida Constitution. After many years of effort by Asian community activists and their supporters, revocation of the section of the constitution forbidding “aliens ineligible for citizenry” from owning property will be on a state referendum in November. If adopted, Florida will be the last state in the Union to rescind such laws.

“The most important contribution this book makes,” said Andrés Gómez from Alianza Martiana, “is to show how Cubans of Chinese descent were part of forging the Cuban nation and the contributions they made to the revolution.”

“Those who hope for a transition from socialism to capitalism in Cuba are absurd,” Gómez said. “What is happening today in Cuba is not because Fidel has retired but precisely because of what Fidel taught us.” The revolution is stronger today, he explained, noting steps under way to increase access to universities for youth from the poorest sections of the population, a high percentage of whom are Black.

Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of Our History Is Still Being Written, explained that Cubans who made the revolution nearly 50 years ago were young people who “didn’t start as communists or socialists.”

This book, she said, like many of the nearly 60 other titles on Cuba that Pathfinder has published, is the story of young people who wanted to create a greater degree of social justice. “That was what lay behind the revolution’s early measures—land reform, a literacy campaign, the laws barring discrimination based on the color of one’s skin, and the expansion of jobs for women,” Waters explained.

As the revolution carried out these measures, it confronted the property and privileges of U.S. capitalist families whose government, she said, initiated the aggression against the Cuban revolution that continues to this day.

Waters paid tribute to some of the latest targets of Washington’s determination to crush Cuba’s example, “the five heroes of the Cuban revolution who have spent nearly a decade in U.S. prisons held hostage by the American government to punish the Cuban people for having made a socialist revolution, for their refusal to surrender.” The five are Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, and René González.

“The book,” Waters explained, “is not about the past, although it is rich in history. It is about the struggles we are involved in today. Through it we can understand better why millions are in the streets in the United States demanding legalization for immigrants, fighting for a world without borders, for a day when we whose labor transforms nature and produces the wealth of the world can cross borders as freely as capital crosses borders.”  
 
Setback for rightists
Prior to the meeting, El Nuevo Herald, the mass circulation Spanish-language daily newspaper, ran an article about the program quoting Félix Ismael Rodríguez, the president of the Association of the Veterans of the Bay of Pigs (Brigade 2506), the band of CIA mercenaries who assaulted Cuba in 1961, and Huber Matos, a well-known enemy of the Cuban revolution. Both denounced the book and the meeting.

“It is a book of communist propaganda that they have the freedom to present here, taking advantage of the liberties of a democratic society, something we cannot do in a totalitarian society such as that existing in Cuba,” Rodríguez said. Matos said, according to El Nuevo Herald, that the book launching was “‘an attempted diatribe’ by partisans of the government of Raúl Castro.”

Over the past decades, right-wing opponents of the Cuban Revolution have attempted, and sometimes succeeded, in mobilizing large forces to disrupt and break up political and cultural events they perceived as favorable to the revolution.

Organizers of the meeting on Our History Is Still Being Written were well prepared to assure that would not happen this time. Despite the front-page article in El Nuevo Herald, the meeting took place without incident, a registration of the expanding political space and shifting relationship of forces in Miami.

Responding to a question by a reporter from the United Chinese News of Florida about political differences among Chinese Cubans in different regions of the island, Waters explained, “The Chinese population in Cuba was class divided, like other sectors of Cuban society. Some were wealthy and fled to places like Miami and New York after the revolution. Others, especially those who were among the poorer layers of the working class, supported the revolution. Our History Is Still Being Written addresses this real class struggle in Cuba.”

Abaka closed the meeting saying, “We all need to learn each other’s languages,” and called for applause to those who translated the program from English into Spanish and Creole and from Spanish into English and Creole. “We should try to organize meetings like this every month,” he added, to enthusiastic applause.
 
 
Related articles:
Cuban art exhibit in Miami reflects opening of political space
Revolutionary continuity in Cuba’s leadership
Remarks by Raúl Castro nominating first vice president, head of army  
 
 
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