Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History

7. Chinese and Cubanidad

190 Those Chinese, besides their unruly and false character, are a terrible competition to commerce in the capital and to native workers. As they live grouped by the hundreds and eat delicacies as eccentric as they are cheap, rats, lizards, dogs, shark fins, and rice seasoned with strange gelatins, their expenses are the lowest, and therefore they can be a ruinous competition to merchants and to Cuban and Spanish workers. —El Sol (1926) Historical ties, of profound spiritual penetration, unite the children of China and the children of Cuba, as there are pages written with the blood of Chinese and Cubans in the book of history, that neither men nor time can ever erase! —Guillermo Tejeiro, Historia ilustrada de la Colonia China en Cuba (1947) C h a p t e r S e v e n Chinese and Cubanidad On 12 April 1946 Chinese minister Li Dijun and Cuban president Ramón Grau San Martín presided over the official unveiling ceremony of a monument dedicated to the Chinese who had participated in the wars for independence from Spain (1868–98). The black granite column is inscribed in Spanish and Chinese with the famous words of Cuban statesman Gonzalo de Quesada in 1892: “There was not a single Chinese Cuban deserter; there was not a single Chinese Cuban traitor.”1 Whites, blacks, mulattos, and Chinese fought side by side in the revolutionary struggles. The Chinese were subsequently valorized in Cuban national memory and historiography for their role in these wars. Beginning with the independence movement, the Chinese became part of a discourse of national identity that paved the way for their incorporation into Cuban society.The monument redeemed the nineteenth-­ century image of the Chinese as oppressed, racialized coolie laborers, replacing it with one of heroic mambises (freedom fighters). Cubans, who themselves had recently achieved independence from Spain, found affinity with the Chinese Revolution of 1911 overthrowing dynastic rule and applauded migrant transnational political activity in support of the Chinese nationalists. Cuban newspapers chronicling the revolution in China noted the significance of 10 October for both young nations, marking the beginning of an independent Cuba and a modern, republican China. Com- Chinese and Cubanidad 191 mentators drew parallels between Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-­ sen and Cuban independence leaders Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and José Martí, a discourse that has continued to this day. Alongside this glorification of the Chinese freedom fighter and celebration of the republican revolution in China, however, anti-­ Chinese images continued to surface. As in other places in the diaspora, Chinese racial identities became “hardened” during times of political transition and social upheaval . In the 1920s and 1930s, an anti-­ immigrant Cuban nationalism developed alongside a politicized labor movement.Transnational Chinese in Cuba became targets of government repression, especially leftists or those outside the fold of the Guomindang, which had earned the respect of Cuban politicians and, along with the Chamber of Commerce, established itself as the voice of the Chinese colony in Cuba after 1927. Whether as hero or villain, savior or scapegoat, patriot or spy, the Chinese became an integral component of Cuban political and social discussions. Two seemingly opposite images developed: one portraying the Chinese as an essential part of the fabric of the Cuban nation, the other portraying the Chinese as exotic and alien, and in its more aggressive form, as dangerous to the Cuban nation. Through the press, ethnic associations, and family and business alliances, Chinese merchants and diplomats came together to protest anti-­ Chinese sentiment in Cuba. Even as they maintained transnational ties to China, Chinese migrants defended themselves as deserving of cultural citizenship and as proper members of a Cuban nation. Portrayals of Chinese as Unassimilable Since the nineteenth century, Chinese workers had been used to quell strikes and temper labor movements throughout the Americas. As Barry Carr notes, planter complaints about the scarcity of laborers and the inadequacy of native Cubans in early-­ twentieth-­ century Cuban agriculture “were as much a reflection of the harsh and arbitrary conditions dominating the sugar industry as they were well-­ founded statements about the Cuban labor market.”2 When the immigration gates lifted for foreign contract workers during the sugar boom, thousands of Chinese flooded the Cuban market, along with even larger numbers of West Indians. As in the nineteenth century, planters separated workers of different ethnicities in part to prevent labor organizing. On the sugar mills of the Cuban-­ American Sugar Company (Cubanaco), for example, Spanish immigrants worked in construction...