Vol. 73/No. 20      May 25, 2009

The book is comprised of interviews with Armando Choy, Moisés Sío Wong, and Gustavo Chui, three Cubans of Chinese descent who as youth joined the revolutionary struggle that overthrew a U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959. All took part in the unfolding socialist revolution, rose to the rank of army general, and today carry out key leadership responsibilities.

The event, part of City College’s “East Meets West” lecture series, was held at the new library of the Mission campus, located in a working-class district of mainly Latin American immigrants. Librarian Anthony Costa welcomed the audience, which included students from an English as a second language class and a Latin American studies course.

The speaker, Martín Koppel, who helped interview the three generals, said the book tells the story of how ordinary men and women, with a leadership true to their interests, made a revolution that transformed society and themselves. It draws particular interest among working people and youth who sense that the capitalist economic crisis today will lead to growing catastrophe for millions in the world.

“The example of Cuba’s socialist revolution has greater importance now than ever,” Koppel said, as it becomes clear that “the world crisis we are entering is not a temporary downturn, and is not the result of government policies or greedy bankers but of the capitalist system itself. Its outcome will be decided by the capacity of workers and farmers to organize a revolutionary movement and take state power.”

Pathfinder Press published Our History Is Still Being Written, he said, to make known the lessons of the Cuban Revolution and why it points the way forward for working people, including right here in the United States. The book also opens a door on a little-known chapter of the history of the Chinese in Cuba and their outstanding role in Cuba’s revolutionary history.

Koppel said the generals were among the thousands of Cubans of their generation who refused to accept the brutal conditions in capitalist Cuba, where sugarcane workers were jobless nine months of the year and where protesting workers and students were commonly tortured and murdered by the Batista dictatorship.

With the 1959 victory, they found that the struggle for greater social equality did not end but was just beginning. Millions became involved in shaping their future, from an agrarian reform that guaranteed land to peasants to a successful nationwide literacy campaign. Women were massively drawn into the workforce, the militias, and all aspects of social and political life. When these changes ran up against the economic interests of the U.S. and Cuban capitalists, working people and their leadership did not back down. They proceeded to take control of their economy and to run it in the interests of the great majority.

A student asked about the process of assimilation of Chinese into the broader Cuban population. Koppel answered that the spread of Cubans of Chinese ancestry throughout the population is difficult to trace, but that today a wide spectrum of Cubans of all skin colors will say with pride that they have ancestors who hailed from China.  
 
Internationalism with no strings
Another questioner asked whether there are exchanges between China and Cuba such as the one between Cuba and Venezuela whereby the services of Cuban doctors are exchanged for Venezuelan oil. Koppel replied that Cuba does not send doctors to Venezuela or anywhere else in order to receive oil or other goods, much less to plunder the natural resources of other nations as the imperialist powers do. It fosters internationalist solidarity, with medical personnel and other volunteers serving in many countries as part of “paying our debt to humanity,” as Cuban leader Fidel Castro has often said.

Others in the audience asked about Chinese-Cuban relations. Koppel gave examples of the active relations between the two countries today, seen in the presence of Chinese buses in Havana that Cuba has purchased to ease the transportation crisis, and the 1,900 Chinese students studying in Cuba.

He noted that during the Sino-Soviet rift from the mid-1960s through the 1980s, relations were virtually nonexistent between Beijing and Havana. Their foreign policies sharply conflicted in Angola where, beginning in 1975, Cuban volunteer combatants—including Choy, Chui, and Sío Wong—aided newly independent Angola against U.S.-backed invasions by apartheid South Africa, while Beijing supported imperialist-backed Angolan insurgents.

In response to a question about the effect of tourism on Havana’s Chinatown, Koppel said that a sharp economic crisis followed the sudden cutoff of favorable trade relations between Cuba and Moscow in the early 1990s. Tourism was developed as a necessity to help gain hard currency, including the revival of restaurants in Havana’s Chinatown. Owners of these restaurants are allowed to earn hard-currency income, which has helped finance traditional Chinese-Cuban associations but also reinforces bourgeois-minded layers in that district. Those layers are backed by Chinese entrepreneurs in other countries and the pro-market policies of the government in China.

The capitalist crisis in the world poses two different roads, Koppel said, the dog-eat-dog road of capitalism, and the road charted by the Cuban leadership of “turning to the capacities and solidarity of working people.”  
 
 
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