Vol. 75/No. 47      December 26, 2011

The book, published by Pathfinder Press, presents the Cuban Revolution through the experiences of Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui and Moisés Sío Wong. As young rebels of Chinese-Cuban ancestry, the three became combatants in the 1956-58 revolutionary war that brought down the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba and opened the door to socialist revolution in the Americas. Each became a general in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces.

In the book the generals talk about the historic place of Chinese immigration to Cuba, as well as more than five decades of revolutionary action and internationalism, from Cuba, Angola and Nicaragua to Venezuela today.

The book relates the experiences of generations of Chinese in Cuba and their heroic contribution to the struggle for national independence from Spanish and U.S. domination.

Par Kumaraswami, codirector of the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, chaired the meeting. Presentations by Aaron Moore from the Centre for Chinese Studies at Manchester University; Raquel Ribeiro, a specialist in Angola at the University of Nottingham; and Jonathan Silberman from Pathfinder Books in London were followed by a lively discussion with the 55 participants, mainly university students.

“Sío Wong explained it was the socialist revolution, and the uprooting of capitalist property relations that perpetuate social inequalities and discrimination, that changed the situation for Chinese in Cuba,” said Silberman.

“This book explains why 375,000 Cuban volunteers served in Angola to defeat the invading apartheid forces,” said Ribeiro. It “was an experience that marked a whole generation of Cubans.”

Moore pointed to the experience of Sío Wong to illustrate how the Chinese community in pre-revolutionary Cuba was class divided.

Since its publication in 2005, more than 100 meetings on five continents have been organized to discuss the book. This was the 13th such event in the U.K. Fourteen copies of Our History Is Still Being Written, including two in Chinese, were sold leading up to and at the meeting. Participants milled around afterwards to talk and 15 continued the discussion at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

Silberman was interviewed the previous Sunday by Ben Peng on BBC Radio Manchester’s “Chinatown,” a program directed towards the Chinese community in Manchester, where he spoke about the book and the upcoming meeting.
 
 
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