Vol. 73/No. 31      August 17, 2009

The meeting was one of multiple events at which Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, spoke during a July 17-25 visit to New Zealand.

The comments were part of the animated discussion at a meeting sponsored by the public library in Botany, a southern suburb of Auckland that has become home to a sizeable number of immigrants from China over the past decade and a half.

Waters had begun her visit at the July 17-19 “Rising Dragons Soaring Bananas” conference in Auckland. (The full text of Waters’s speech at the conference was published in last week’s Militant, along with a report of the conference.)

Her presentations drew on the book Our History Is Still Being Written: the Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, published by Pathfinder Press. Waters edited the book in which Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong talk about their five decades of experience on the front lines of the Cuban Revolution. They also discuss the historic place of Chinese immigration to Cuba. A Chinese translation of the book was launched at a meeting in Beijing in March.

The discussion at the Botany library—located in the middle of a large, busy shopping mall—centered on “what is socialism?” and the character and course of the Cuban and Chinese revolutions. Translation between Mandarin and English was provided by a Botany library staff member and another participant in the meeting.

Several in the audience who were born in China and today live in New Zealand explained that they found the talk interesting and informative, but remained unconvinced that a socialist revolution could provide a way forward.

“I love the story about the struggle, but I don’t believe that socialism is the way,” commented one. He said that hopes aroused by the anticolonial and socialist revolutions following World War II had been dashed. Waters welcomed the questions, saying they “raised the most important issues facing working people everywhere in the world today.”

Another of the Chinese participants remarked that he had a family friend who had left Cuba because life got worse, not better, after the revolution.  
 
Gains won by Cuban Revolution
In response, Waters noted that not everyone in Cuba had welcomed the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship in 1959, or supported the broadly popular revolutionary measures taken by the new government. Workers and peasants mobilized to carry out a land reform; end organized gambling and prostitution operations, including in Chinatown; teach every adult how to read and write, even in the most remote mountain areas; and nationalized major industries and banks as the U.S. government tried to roll back these gains.

“The attitude of people in Cuba to the revolution—whatever their ancestry—depended more often than not on which class they were part of before the revolution,” she said.

“The Chinese, like other Cubans, were divided by class. Some were wealthy property owners, bankers, and businessmen with capitalist family ties in Panama, Venezuela, and the United States. Some had fled China after the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and had ties to the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan,” she explained. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party forces overran the island territory of Taiwan—historically part of China—in 1949 after their defeat on the mainland in the Chinese revolution.

Many of those wealthy Chinese families found their privileged lifestyle curtailed and decided to leave Cuba, said Waters.

“However, the big majority of Cubans of Chinese descent were working people,” Waters noted, “and for them life was better after the revolution. They had access to jobs, health care, education, and were no longer the object of institutionalized discrimination.” Like Choy, Chui, and Sío Wong, they were ready to give their lives for the revolution.

Cuba remains an underdeveloped country, Waters noted, and conditions of life are not easy. Cubans, from Raúl Castro on down, are the first to tell you that many problems they face today are their own doing. “But the single biggest problem they face is the determination of the U.S. rulers to punish them for their revolution,” she said. Economic war to try to undermine the support of the Cuban people for the revolution has been “the policy of the U.S. government for 50 years.”  
 
Chinese revolution
Turning to China, Waters observed, “The revolution there was one of the greatest anti-imperialist, national liberation struggles in history. Between 1949 and 1952, working people in the cities and the countryside put an end to the brutal rule of the wealthy landlords and capitalists. But the leadership of China’s Communist Party—like the privileged ruling caste of the Soviet Union under Stalin and his successors—had a different class character than the revolutionary leadership of workers and farmers in Cuba. Despite the words they used, what Mao Zedong and his party brought forth in China was not communism, but its antithesis.”

Waters urged participants in the meeting to buy Our History Is Still Being Written and to pick up the discussion again after reading it. With the enthusiastic cooperation of the library staff, informal discussion continued after the meeting adjourned, eventually wrapping up almost an hour past the library’s closing time.

While the Botany library meeting was one of the highpoints of the visit, Waters also had an opportunity to explain the Cuban Revolution to a still wider audience in “Asian Report,” a weekly 15-minute radio talk show hosted by Jason Moon on free-to-air public broadcaster Radio New Zealand. Recorded on July 20, the 13-minute interview was broadcast July 28. It can be heard at http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/asian_report.  
 
Campus meetings
Waters also spoke to two campus meetings, one at the University of Auckland sponsored by the Spanish Department and hosted by Kathryn Lehman, a department senior lecturer; the other at Auckland University of Technology, sponsored by the Centre for Asian and Migrant Health Research, and chaired by Shoba Nayar.

The speaking tour of New Zealand was wrapped up at a July 24 Militant Labour Forum on “Cuba and Africa—Solidarity to Africa and its struggles for freedom: hallmark of the Cuban Revolution.” Both Waters and Tom Baumann, a leader of the U.S. Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party candidate for Manhattan borough president in New York City, addressed the meeting.

Among the nearly 40 participants were several students and others who had built the meetings throughout the week, and four Tamil activists who have been actively mobilizing defense of the Tamil people’s fight for self-determination in face of the Sri Lankan government’s recent brutal military offensive to crush that struggle.  
 
 
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