Vol. 74/No. 10      March 15, 2010

Waters, who is president of Pathfinder Press, is the author or editor of numerous books including Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution. She has spoken at dozens of panel presentations discussing the themes of that book across the United States and in other countries.

At a regional ISSCO conference held last July in Auckland, New Zealand, Waters presented a paper on “The Unique History of Chinese in Cuba” (see Aug. 10, 2009, Militant).

ISSCO’s previous full conference, held in Beijing in September 2007, drew participants from 20 countries, mostly researchers who focus on the history and development of Chinese communities around the world. The majority came from Asia, including China, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and South Korea. Three-quarters of the 20 million ethnic Chinese outside China live in Southeast Asia.

ISSCO, founded in 1992 in San Francisco, previously held full conferences in Hong Kong; Manila, Philippines; Taipei, Taiwan; and Copenhagen, Denmark, in addition to regional gatherings.

The host of the upcoming conference is the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. The local organizers are the Chinese Heritage Centre and the university’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Singapore, an island city-state off the southern tip of Malaysia, has a population of 5 million, three-quarters of whom are of Chinese heritage. A former British colony, Singapore has four official languages: English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil.
 

Chinese arrived in both Cuba and the United States in large and substantially equal numbers between the late 1840s and 1875. Their weight and place in the bourgeois democratic revolutions that swept both countries in the second half of the 19th century was, however, markedly different.

The emergence of the United States as an imperialist power in the final decades of the 19th century was accompanied by an expanding wave of racist terror at home. Jim Crow segregation was consolidated across the U.S. South, accompanied by anti-Asian exclusion laws and pogroms, especially, but not only, in the West. This rising power of finance capital in the United States had been concretized in, and was accelerated by, the crushing of the post-Civil War Radical Reconstruction regimes in the South by 1877.

Throughout the same period, tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers in Cuba were conquering their freedom as they joined in the revolutionary war against Spanish colonial domination and helped to forge the Cuban nation. That 30-year war, which won independence from Spain in 1898, only to fall under the boot of the rising empire to the North, was inseparable from the struggle to abolish both slavery and indentured servitude of all kinds.

As these revolutionary battles unfolded in Cuba and were paralleled by mounting anti-Chinese racism in the United States, thousands of Chinese left the United States in the 1870s to resettle in Cuba, where they became known as the “Californianos.” At the same time, Spanish and Cuban property owners, eager to reduce the numbers of rebellious and potentially insurgent Chinese laborers in Cuba, shipped significant numbers to the sugar plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi, where capitalist landowners faced a severe shortage of labor in the wake of the Second American Revolution and abolition of slavery. Contracted to work the plantations of the Mississippi Delta, the newly arrived Chinese laborers joined with Black freedmen to become protagonists in the postwar labor struggles and pitched battles against the counterrevolutionary forces that by the 1880s had drowned in blood the revolutionary regimes of Radical Reconstruction in those states.

The paper will look at the consequences for Chinese Cubans and Chinese Americans of the interrelated yet divergent courses of the class struggle in Cuba and the United States over the last 150 years. It will address the question: how has discrimination against men and women of Chinese descent been virtually eliminated in Cuba today, while anti-Chinese racism, both blatant and subtle, flourishes elsewhere throughout the world, the United States included?
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. doctors leave Haiti as Cubans expand care
Three of Cuban Five moved from Miami jail
Write to the Cuban Five
Chinese-Cuban general to start tour in Montreal
Cuban book fair travels throughout provinces
Panel discussions present literature on Cuban Revolution and communist strategy  
 
 
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