Vol. 73/No. 13      April 6, 2009

The three generals—Gustavo Chui, Armando Choy, and Moisés Sío Wong—along with Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the book, all spoke at the February 23 event. The Chinese students are going to school in Tarará or in nearby Cojímar, towns on the eastern outskirts of Havana. There are nearly 1,900 Chinese students in Cuba today, about 1,100 of them studying Spanish at Tarará, which in prerevolutionary Cuba was a wealthy resort enclave. They are on scholarships, with the Cuban government paying all their expenses here.

Some 30 leaders of the Chinese associations based in Havana’s Chinatown also attended the meeting, along with professors from the University of Havana’s Spanish-language department who are responsible for the school and the Chinese-Cuban Studies program.

After a welcome delivered in Spanish by Wang Silu, one of the students here, the book and the speakers were introduced by Iraida Aguirrechu, a senior editor at Editora Política, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. Aguirrechu participated in the interviews that make up the book, published by Pathfinder Press in English and Spanish, and helped at every stage of the book's production.

She noted that a Chinese edition of Our History Is Still Being Written was recently published in Beijing and added that a Cuban edition published by Editora Política will come out this year with a run size of 10,000.

As teenagers growing up in different regions of Cuba in the 1950s, Chui, Choy, and Sío Wong each joined the revolutionary movement, led by the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement, that mobilized working people to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in January 1959. Each of them continues to shoulder important leadership responsibilities to this day.

Chui is part of the national leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution and president of the Chung Wah Casino, the main Chinese association in Chinatown. Choy is responsible for the administration of the Port of Havana. Sío Wong, who retired last year as president of the National Institute of State Reserves, is president of the Cuba-China Friendship Association.

Describing the content of the book, Waters told the youthful audience that the life stories of the three young rebels help us all to understand, “What is a socialist revolution? Where do men and women like the Five Heroes of the Cuban Revolution, unjustly imprisoned in the United States, come from? What gives them such strength, such capacity to resist?"

The book, which is in fact "an introduction to the Cuban Revolution," Waters said, was published by Pathfinder Press “because working people and youth in the United States whose minds are open to the world need to know this history.”

She noted the broad reception the book has enjoyed. Some 8,000 copies have been sold in the three years since the book was first published, she reported, and more than 60 meetings to discuss it have taken place in 43 cities in the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Venezuela, and Cuba, attended by about 5,000 people.

It has drawn particular interest among Chinese and other Asian Americans—a sizable and growing population in the United States, “among the tens of millions of immigrants from all over the world who are today placing their stamp on politics in the United States,” said Waters.

She cited the afterword in the Chinese edition, written by translator Wang Lusha, who expresses the pride felt by many young Chinese when they read the book and learn for the first time of the outstanding role of Chinese immigrants in Cuba’s revolutionary history, and begin to understand why a socialist revolution is necessary to create the economic conditions for the fight to eliminate racial discrimination and other forms of oppression to be successful.  
 
Role of Chinese in Cuba’s struggles
Gustavo Chui, whose father was born in China and whose mother was Black, explained how growing up in capitalist Cuba he encountered racial discrimination against both Blacks and Chinese. The Chinese community itself, he noted, was class-divided, with rich and poor.

The large numbers of Chinese, brought to Cuba in the 19th century as indentured laborers, “became part of the Cuban nationality through their struggles, from the independence struggle against Spain to today,” Chui said.

Armando Choy highlighted the unique role played by Chinese combatants in the 1868 and 1895 independence wars against Spanish colonial rule. “There were entire battalions of Chinese fighters,” he said, units of 500 or more. A measure of the respect they won as combatants, Choy explained, was that when revolutionary general Ignacio Agramonte was killed in combat, a unit of 72 soldiers, all Chinese, was chosen to go into hostile territory to retrieve his body.

He recounted how as young rebels he, like Chui and Sío Wong, joined the struggle against the Batista tyranny. But there were many more Chinese-Cubans in the Rebel Army, he noted. They fought until victory on “January 1, 1959, when Cuba became a truly free and sovereign nation.” Sío Wong began his remarks by pointing out that they were meeting in Tarará, where before the revolution Blacks and Chinese had been excluded. After 1959 Tarará was turned into a recreational center for Cuban children, and following the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster it became a center for treating, free of charge, Ukrainian children affected by the radiation. Some victims of that disaster continue under medical care in Tarará while more recently it was used for Operation Miracle, a program offering eye surgery to patients from other Latin American countries suffering from cataracts.

“I am going to violate one of your rules here," Sío Wong said with a smile. "I know the rule is you're not allowed to speak Chinese here because you are studying Spanish. But we’ve brought copies of Our History Is Still Being Written in Chinese,” he said as he displayed the cover of the Chinese edition.

“And I want to thank Pathfinder Press for spreading the truth about the Cuban Revolution—for many years—from inside the belly of the monster,” Sío Wong said.  
 
Cuban Revolution's internationalism
He noted that revolutionary Cuba was the first Latin American country to recognize the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in September 1960, and fought for the PRC to take China's seat at the United Nations in 1971, replacing Taiwan.

Talking about the Cuban Revolution's internationalist combat missions, Sío Wong singled out the help given to “defend the independence of Angola, win the independence of Namibia, and defeat apartheid in South Africa.”

This enormous effort, described in Our History Is Still Being Written, succeeded, he said, “because the more than 350,000 Cuban combatants went to Angola as volunteers. That mission strengthened the revolution enormously, it strengthened our consciousness."

Pointing to himself and the other two generals, Sío Wong said, "We experienced capitalism. But the majority of Cubans were born after the revolution. Those who went to Angola had the opportunity of seeing capitalism with their own eyes. And today we continue that experience with the doctors who are serving missions in Latin America and other regions.”

At the end of the program, students swarmed the table where Our History Is Still Being Written was being sold, then crowded around the speakers' platform to get the autographs of the authors. They purchased 150 copies of the book in Spanish, and all copies available in Chinese and English, 45 and 25 respectively, plus a number of other Pathfinder titles. While a few students politely told the Militant they were not interested in the book, others said they were buying more than one copy in order to send some home to China as presents.

“I wasn’t interested in Cuba before coming here to study," Yang Jing, 19, told the Militant. "Now I’ve gotten very interested in learning more about this country.”

Dong Lei, 21, known here by her Spanish name Melodía, purchased not only Our History Is Still Being Written but a range of other books, from How Far We Slaves Have Come by Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, to Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by Mary-Alice Waters.

“I knew little about Cuba before,” Melodía said. “But the history of the Chinese in Cuba and of the Cuban Revolution is important.” She had first seen Pathfinder books a week earlier at the Havana book fair, where she purchased several and learned of the event planned for Tarará. She asked her teachers at the school in Cojímar to arrange for a group of students from there to attend the event in Tarará, which they did.
 
 
Related articles:
Chinese-Cuban generals’ book presented in China  
 
 
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