Vol. 73/No. 26      July 13, 2009

The meeting was held at the Agincourt Community Centre, in Scarborough, part of the Toronto metropolitan area, and home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from China.

With some 40 people attending, the meeting helped lay the groundwork for inviting Armando Choy, one of the Chinese Cuban generals interviewed in the book, to speak in several Canadian cities.

The book tells the story of Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong. As young men they participated in Cuba’s revolutionary war to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, opening the road to the first socialist revolution in the Americas. Today they shoulder major responsibilities in the leadership of the revolution.

On the panel were Jorge Soberón, Consul General of the Cuban Consulate in Toronto; Lorrie Wang, of the Chinese Canadian National Council (CCNC) Toronto chapter; Dick Chan, a founding CCNC member; and Mary-Alice Waters, editor of Our History Is Still Being Written and president of Pathfinder Press.

Karen Sun, CCNC Toronto executive director, opened the meeting noting that two years earlier when the book first appeared in English and Spanish Choy, who had been scheduled to tour Canada, was unable to come. She urged those attending to help organize his coming visit.

“It’s amazing to realize that when Cuba was fighting for its liberation from Spain in the 1860s, there were Chinese involved in the struggle,” Soberón stated, referring to the sections of the book describing the important role Chinese who had been brought to Cuba as indentured laborers played in Cuba’s independence struggle.

Using a slide show, Chan detailed the struggle of Chinese immigrants in Canada against the racist policies of the Canadian government, from the time Chinese immigrant workers built the trans-Canada railroad in the 19th century to today. “Until recently these Chinese railroad workers were forgotten pioneers,” he said. Likewise, “this book brings forward the little-known history of Chinese in Cuba.”

In her remarks Wang said she knew little about the Cuban Revolution before reading Our History is Still Being Written. “The Chinese Cubans liberated themselves by fighting for all the oppressed people of Cuba,” she said. As a result “Chinese Cubans participated actively in the socialist revolution and were themselves the beneficiaries of the 1959 victory.”  
 
An alternative to capitalist society
Waters described the keen interest with which the three generals have followed meetings such as the one in Scarborough. “Today we are living through the first tremors of what will be decades of deepening economic, social, and political crises of the capitalist system,” she noted. “And this book brings the Cuban Revolution alive for people who are looking for a revolutionary answer to the inevitable course and consequences of capitalism.”

Waters explained that as young men the three generals along with millions of others didn’t start out to make a socialist revolution, but in taking steps that aided Cuban workers and farmers, they came into a head-on confrontation with the wealthy families in the United States that owned much of Cuba’s land and industries.

“The Cuban people simply did not back down,” continued Waters. “That is the explanation for everything that has happened up to today—the 50-year effort by Washington to make the Cuban people pay for what they accomplished. “That is why five Cuban revolutionaries are in U.S. prisons today,” she added. (See articles on pages 8 and 10.)

Waters cited a passage of Our History Is Still Being Written in which Sío Wong answers a question put to him by a visiting Chinese scholar: how was it possible, unlike anywhere else in the Americas, for a person of Chinese descent like himself to carry such major responsibilities in Cuba? “Sío Wong answered him: ‘because here we made a socialist revolution,’” said Waters, a revolution that eliminated capitalist property relations.

The young Chinese translator of the Chinese-language edition, Waters noted, makes this same point in the afterword to the book.

“Knowing the discrimination Chinese living outside of China face he couldn’t believe that a person of Chinese ancestry was an aide to Raúl Castro and a general in the Cuban army. A friend of his sent him the book when he was living and studying in New Zealand and he decided to translate it to make the history of Chinese in Cuba known to other Chinese like himself,” Waters stated.  
 
Wide-ranging discussion
A wide-range of questions and comments were raised from the floor in the discussion that followed the panel presentations.

In response to a question on the importance of the international campaign to win freedom for the Cuban Five, Soberón summarized the decades-long series of terrorist and other attacks by right-wing Cubans operating out of Miami with the complicity of the U.S. government.

“The jail sentences given to the Cuban Five are unprecedented,” said Waters, noting that the measures taken against them violated the democratic and constitutional rights of all those living in the United States and “were an attack on working people as a whole. The struggle to free the Cuban Five is crucial for us all.”

Both the Chinese-language Fairchild radio news network and the Omni 2 television station, which broadcasts programs in many different languages, sent reporters to the meeting. Two mandarin-language newscasts on Omni 2 television featured a report on the event, including an interview with Waters and shots of the Chinese-language book cover along with the Pathfinder Press Web site from which the book can be ordered.
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist conference extends support to Cuban Five
Cuban 5: ‘We continue to resist until there is justice’  
 
 
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