Vol. 72/No. 44      November 10, 2008

Zhao was one of the panelists discussing Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution. Seventy people attended the discussion, held October 16 at the University of Kent in Canterbury, 60 miles southeast of London.

A student at the university and member of the Chinese Culture Society, Zhao told the audience he had come to the United Kingdom from China three years ago. There “we learned at school about the Opium Wars and how people were taken to the U.S.—but not about Cuba,” he said. He was referring to the 19th century “coolie trade” in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese were shipped to the Americas and press-ganged into indentured labor.

Our History Is Still Being Written, published by Pathfinder Press, tells the story of Chinese Cubans, including their participation in the 19th century wars of independence against Spanish colonial rule as well as the 1959 revolution.

“The wars of independence were about human rights,” Zhao said. “That’s why the Chinese fought. They had to fight for their own freedom … I learned a part of Chinese emigrant history in this book that I couldn’t find anywhere else.”

Neva Sadikoglu welcomed the audience on behalf of the Current Affairs Society, one of the student groups sponsoring the event. Two weeks earlier, the group had hosted a presentation by Young Socialists member Alex Xezonakis on the international campaign to free five Cuban revolutionaries who have spent a decade in U.S. prisons, framed up on charges ranging from “conspiracy to commit espionage” to “conspiracy to commit murder.”

Other sponsors mentioned by Sadikoglu included the Hispanic Studies Department, Hispanic Society, Chinese Culture Society, Centre for American Studies, Kent Mauritian Society, and Pathfinder Books.

“This book charts the life story of three remarkable revolutionaries: Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong,” said Giacomo Macola, a lecturer in African history who chaired the meeting. “It takes us to three countries in three continents—China, Cuba, and Angola.”

Macola introduced the speakers. Besides Zhao, they were William Rowlandson, a lecturer in Hispanic studies, and Jonathan Silberman from Pathfinder Books in London.  
 
China, Cuba, and Britain
A clip was shown from the documentary Ancestors in the Americas: Coolies, Sailors and Settlers by Chinese American filmmaker Loni Ding. “As we saw in the film, after abolition of the slave trade Britain became a flag bearer of the coolie trade,” Rowlandson pointed out.

Today, Silberman noted in his remarks, “there are tens of thousands of undocumented Chinese workers in this country, working in unsafe conditions for subminimum wage.”

In recent years, he said, these conditions of superexploitation were highlighted by two disasters. One was the 2004 drowning of 23 undocumented Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, who were left to the mercy of the tide by their bosses. The other, also in 2004, was the suffocation of 58 Chinese immigrants in Dover who had been forced to travel in a lorry (truck) container.

“More important is the resistance of Chinese and other immigrant workers in this country,” Silberman said. “Earlier this year, workers in the catering trade—from Bangladeshi, Turkish, and Chinese restaurants—took to the streets in London to protest police raids and deportations, to raise the banner that they are workers, not criminals.”

Workers like these find a great deal in Our History Is Still Being Written, he said. He cited the afterword of the new Chinese translation by Wang Lusha, the translator. Wang, who lived outside China for five years, “writes that at first the prejudice he encountered made him almost ashamed to be Chinese. But one man made him rethink this: Moisés Sío Wong, a general, who, through this book, introduced Wang to many other Chinese Cubans with revolutionary histories,” Silberman said.

In the lively question-and-answer period, an exchange developed over Cuba’s internationalist mission to Angola. Between 1975 and 1991, some 375,000 Cuban volunteers helped beat back an invasion of Angola by South Africa’s apartheid regime. In the book, the three generals relate their participation in this effort.

Macola said he had doubts about the book’s assertion that the Cuban government’s decision to send troops to Angola was taken independently of Moscow “until I read Conflicting Missions by Piero Gleijeses, which documents this fact thoroughly.”

He said he still wondered if Cuba’s motives in Angola “could be ascribed exclusively to ideology, to internationalism.” He cited a CIA document suggesting Cuba had been gathering a force of radical African states as a counterbalance to the Soviet Union.

“Cuba was driven by internationalism,” Rowlandson replied. “But it was also looking for new forces and alliances… . The two are not mutually exclusive. I don’t think there was any underlying conspiracy.”

Silberman said revolutionary Cuba’s first mission in Africa was to newly independent Algeria in 1963, helping to repel an imperialist-inspired invasion by the Moroccan regime. Cuba sent tanks to Algeria that it had just received from Moscow on the explicit instructions that they only be used in Cuba. “That’s what Cuba’s revolutionaries do: take their place at the front line of the class struggle, at home and abroad. That’s why the generals were in Angola, and why three of the Cuban Five were also there.”  
 
Cuba in face of world crisis
One of the themes of the discussion was the international financial crisis. Rowlandson centered his remarks on the book’s explanation of how the revolution confronted what in Cuba is known as the Special Period, the deep economic crisis, including a food crisis, that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, with which Cuba had enjoyed favorable trade relations.

He noted that Sío Wong was among the main promoters of urban agriculture in Cuba to grow food. By 2004 this cultivation involved 380,000 people who produced some 4 million tons of vegetables that year.

Answering a question about how Cuba is affected by today’s world financial crisis, Silberman said that although working people there have some protection because of the social gains of their revolution, Cuba cannot escape the impact of an international economic contraction. He pointed out that with the rise in food prices on the world market, it will cost Cuba an additional $1 billion to import the same amount of food this year as last.

“Is Cuba an example to us?” asked student Julia Murphy. “Are there disadvantages?”

Rowlandson said Cuba showed what ordinary people could achieve “from the grass roots.” He said Cuba’s “human rights record has been patchy… . But I recently attended a talk in London by Cuban author Leonardo Padura, who contrasted the openness of discussion and debate in Cuba today as compared to the 1970s, when cultural policies were strongly influenced by the Soviet Union and many writers and artists could not get published because they were deemed ‘politically unreliable.’ Padura said now ‘the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be put back.’”

Silberman said in Cuba working people have conquered political power. One of the measures the revolutionary government carried out was a thoroughgoing land reform. “This allows Cuba’s workers and farmers to confront the huge challenges we’ve been discussing. This course of struggle is addressed in the book. It shows what’s necessary and possible here in the United Kingdom.”

At the meeting or leading up to it, 11 people purchased Our History at Kent University. Thirty-two subscribed to the Militant. Many participants stayed for discussion well after the meeting ended, and 30 people carried on at an on-campus bar.  
 
 
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