Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture

9. Self-Definition and the Chinos Mambises

9 Self-Definition and the Chinos Mambises [Colonialism] turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. Frantz Fanon No one has related in prose, nor sung in verse, the deeds of the sons of the Celestial Empire in the epic Cuban war!1 Gonzalo de Quesada For the purpose of promoting assimilation and presenting a positive image of immigrant Jews, some Jewish Argentine authors envisioned Argentina as the land of the future and used their Sephardic heritage as a link to their adopted country (despite their Ashkenazi origin).2 In the same way, Chinese Cubans like Antonio Chuffat Latour and Regino Pedroso devote their efforts to a representation of difference based on the premise that the Chinese community “belongs” within the realm of the Cuban nation. In their zealous attempt to assimilate themselves and their community to mainstream society, however, they depict Cuba as the land of Western progress and freedom, while relegating China to the usual images of backwardness, oppression, and passivity; that is, the same images created by Western powers to justify their intervention and subsequent colonization. In Apunte histórico de los chinos en Cuba (1927), Chuffat Latour adopts a questionable stance: while emphasizing the Cubanness of the Chinese colony (and his own), he recalls Chinese celebrations of royal weddings in Spain, which he conciliatorily calls “la madre patria” (motherland). Chuffat Latour challenges Creole dominance and demands the acceptance of Chinese culture in Cuba by using all available rhetorical devices to separate his ethnic group as far as possible from the image of the strange Other. His text constitutes a sort of symbolic victory over oblivion: a Chinese mulatto subject, refusing to become a passive object of a non-Chinese anthropological study, writes in the language of the former oppressors (he admits to having studied Spanish in order to formulate a manifesto of Chinese diasporic thought). Apunte histórico is, therefore, an invaluable docu- 120 Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture ment of self-representation and self-empowerment by an Afro-Chinese author . Oddly, Chuffat Latour positions himself both as a representative of the Chinese community in Cuba (a native informant) and as someone who distances himself from them and speaks about them from “the outside.” He refers to the Chinese in the third person plural and often compares them with “us,” the Cubans. While Chuffat Latour speaks for the disenfranchised Chinese colony and is proud of his Chinese descent, he considers himself fully integrated into Cuban society and allies himself with the Creoles at whom he targets his study. In a sense, he represents the colonial “mimic man” who reinforces colonial authority while he “talks back” (or writes back) to it. Frantz Fanon has studied this psychological predisposition among “native ” writers in the colonies: “While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnic or subjectivist means, now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people” (155). Chuffat Latour’s conciliatory tone responds to a strategic positioning with a twofold goal: to “charm the oppressor ,” as Fanon puts it, and to express his disappointment in Cuba’s failure to recognize the key role of the Chinese in the building of the nation. In this context, Lisa Yun reminds us that “Chuffat openly expressed his indignation at the easy forgetting of coolie labour and their pivotal role in Cuban independence wars” (33). As to his objective of gaining Creole support and pleasing his potential readers, he argues that the foreign usurpers were not exclusively Spanish, given that the coolie trade was carried out with international cooperation, that is, with recruiters and ships of various nationalities. He also perceives Western culture as embodying “civilization” and progress, while Chinese customs represent the past and need updating: China “needed to be injected and illuminated with the enlightenment of human progress. [. . .] The advancement of civilized peoples.”3 In other words, Chuffat Latour depicts China as an “uncivilized” space, thus showing how he has internalized a double consciousness in which he sees his own ethnic group through Eurocentric, hegemonic ideas of cultural supremacy. Later, however, he contradicts himself—as he does numerous times throughout the text—by stating that Western usurpers were “wrongly called civilized men.”4 The introduction begins with a brief review of the Chinese political system at the time: the emperors, the mandarins, and other...