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3 Cuban Sinophobia Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. [. . .] Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, with its marvelous manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor. Ernest Renan At both official and popular levels, xenophobic anti-Chinese sentiments have been common in most countries with a significant Chinese minority. Cuban cultural production often reflects this irrational fear and hatred, which may originate from very different sources. In the tradition of the “Yellow Peril” complex, the hostility may be caused by the Chinese having emasculating jobs traditionally assigned to women, competition in the job market, jealousy of the Chinese immigrants’ economic success, or fear of the unknown, among other factors. In other cases, the increasing number of Chinese gave rise to fears that the local culture would be tainted or, worse yet, that Western civilization itself would be undermined. As we will see, some texts even flirt with the notion of the Chinese as subhuman beings, and reject cultural differences, which are seen in negative and stereotypical ways, such as the proclivity to silence, the “sinister” secrecy of their societies, or even their peculiar smiles. The politics of representation surrounding the Chinese Cuban subject has undergone a telling evolution throughout the decades. Whereas the texts published during the last decades of the nineteenth century silenced or erased the Chinese presence, those published during the first half of the twentieth century echoed the tacit and at times overt racism of their authors . From the 1950s to the 1980s, the texts evolved into Orientalist and strategically self-Orientalizing perspectives that eventually gave way in the 1990s and early twenty-first century to a more realistic and less homogenizing depiction of their presence and heritage on the island. When analyzing works published during the first half of the twentieth century, a period when the Chinese colony was thriving, it is important to take into account that they were produced during the U.S. military occupation (1899–1922) and the subsequent North American political control of the island (1923–1958). Cuban Sinophobia 47 This foreign presence exacerbated an animosity that had existed ever since the first Chinese indentured laborer arrived in Cuba. As several historians and critics (including Juan Jiménez Pastrana, Duvon Clough Corbitt, Napole ón Seuc, and Kathleen López) point out, the occupation brought with it North American anti-Chinese legislation and, in the 1950s, the complete prohibition of Chinese immigration:1 “The legislation then in force in that country [Cuba], a Decree of January 13, 1939, revalidating Military Order No. 155 of May 15, 1902, issued by the North American Military Government to apply to Cuba the immigration laws of the United States at that time, went the limit in discrimination” (Corbitt i). After these laws were enacted, only Chinese merchants, tourists, and diplomats, along with their families, were allowed entry. However, on November 12, 1942, a new treaty that allowed Chinese citizens to enter Cuba and to have full legal protection improved diplomatic relations between Cuba and China (Corbitt ii). Like testimonials, other manifestations of popular culture, such as jokes and humorous stories, reflect the collective attitude toward the Chinese and the all-too-common stereotypes about the Chinese mind. Notably, in the collection Cuentos populares cubanos de humor (Popular Cuban Humorous Tales; 1981), edited by Samuel Feijóo (1914–1992), an entire section is devoted to jokes about Chinese men, who share stereotypical traits: they are naive, easily scared and deceived, physically abused by others, and unable to pronounce the phoneme /r/. Of course, this common way of depicting Cantonese speakers’ pronunciation of Spanish gives the false impression that all native speakers of Spanish pronounce the language the way it is written. As we know, this is not always the case for many native speakers, in either Spain or any of its former colonies. Lack of linguistic competence has been a key factor in the marginalization of the Chinese community in Cuba, as we see in this cultural production. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has emphasized the social conditions of communication: “the efficacy of an utterance, the power of conviction which is granted to it, depends on the pronunciation (and secondarily the vocabulary) of the person who utters it; that is, through this particularly reliable measure of statutory competence, it depends on the authority of the speaker” (70). Indeed, in many of the dialogues included in Cuentos populares cubanos de humor one notices that the...

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