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5 Cuban-Chinese Relations after the End of the Cold War Carlos Alzugaray Treto In the relatively short period of twenty years since the end of the Cold War, China has become one of Cuba’s main strategic allies. Simultaneously, the Caribbean nation has turned into one of the Middle Kingdom’s most significant partners in the Western Hemisphere. From a political standpoint, Cuba and China share two important traits: their political leaders openly proclaim that they are endeavoring to build a socialist economic system with “national characteristics”; and their communist parties have exercised basically unchallenged ideological and political hegemony ever since the victories of their respective revolutions in 1949 and 1959. Nevertheless, in 1989 few experts would have predicted such an expansion and consolidation of relations between the two countries. Cuba and China are on opposite sides of the planet. They are completely different in terms of population and territory, and their national, political, and cultural identities contrast significantly. Moreover, despite an auspicious beginning to their relations in the 1960s, for the better part of twenty years, from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, Havana and Beijing often found themselves on opposite sides of major international issues.1 How and why, then, did Cuba and China become such close allies after the end of the Cold War? From my standpoint, answering this question entails approaching the subject from historical and political points of view and dividing the chronology into four periods: a synopsis of relations before 1989; a summary of the main steps taken by both governments to improve their interactions between 1989 and 2001; a presentation of the situation since 2001; and an analysis of the interests and preferences that have determined the present state of Cuban-Chinese connections. Background: 1959–1989 Historically, the relationships between Cuba and China go back to the nineteenth century, when the Spanish colonial regime started to import Chinese Carlos Alzugaray Treto 90 laborers (coolies) as replacements for the diminishing numbers of African slaves working in the cane fields. Between 1847 and 1874, 150,000 male Chinese laborers were imported into Cuba. At the turn of the century a new wave of Chinese immigrants arrived in Cuba from California. The legacy of a fairly significant population of Chinese immigrants can still be felt today all over Cuba, but especially in Havana’s Chinatown. Citizens of Chinese origin were represented in a range of historical and cultural activities. For example, one of the most significant Cuban painters of the twentieth century, Wilfredo Lam, was biracial, born to Chinese and African parents in Sagua la Grande, in central Cuba, a town that had very strong Chinese influences from the mid-nineteenth century. Although separated by ten years, the victories of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions were part of the same broad historical processes taking place fifty to sixty years ago in the third world. Driven by individual historical trajectories , however, both events were interjected into the context of the Cold War— defined as the ideological and geopolitical conflict between capitalism, led by the United States, and socialism, led by the Soviet Union, that spanned several decades of the twentieth century. That clash was particularly acute in the global South, or underdeveloped world, after the Second World War.2 At the time, revolutionary leaders in both Havana and Beijing proclaimed themselves to be inheritors of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The triumph of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army over the Guomindang led by Chiang Kaishek (Jiang Jieshi) and that of the Cuban Rebel Army over the Batista dictatorship relied on similar guerrilla tactics identified with Mao Zedong’s and Che Guevara’s writings. Both revolutionary processes were confronted immediately by sharply hostile policies from administrations in Washington; in both cases, as it had done with the Soviet Union, the U.S. government withheld diplomatic recognition to deny their legitimacy.3 It is no surprise that both China and Cuba adopted strongly anti-imperialist positions, which Beijing maintained until the 1970s. From its establishment in 1949 the Chinese People’s Republic (PRC) endeavored to develop relationships with Latin America and the Caribbean. Most countries in the region, however, followed the U.S. lead, maintaining diplomatic ties with the Republic of China’s Nationalist government in Taipei and refusing to recognize Beijing as the rightful representative of the Chinese people.4 The first real breakthrough came on September 1, 1960, in the First Declaration of Havana, a document Jorge Domínguez considers to be Fidel Castro’s...

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