Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture

10. Exclusion and (Mis)representation

10 Exclusion and (Mis)representation I do not know how one can speak of honor among peoples [the Chinese] who can be made to do nothing without beatings. Montesquieu Ien Ang argues that China is the “land/nation/culture that has loomed largest in the European imagination as the embodiment of the mysterious, inscrutable other” (On Not Speaking Chinese 11). As evidenced in previous chapters, the Chinese have also populated the imaginary of the Cuban nation for decades . However, a parallel destructive process of erasure exists whereby they have been excluded from the official discourse and from historical records. As García Canclini explains, cultural hybridization is a process “from which one can be excluded, or to which we can be subordinated” (xxx). This is evident, for example, in a contradictory passage in Fernando Ortiz’s foundational work Los negros brujos: apuntes para un estudio de etnología criminal (The Black Shamans: Notes for a Study of Criminal Ethnology; 1906), which summarizes the exclusion suffered by the Chinese in the official discourse of hegemonic groups: “The yellow race knew how to isolate itself in such a way that it meant little for the psychology of Cuban society. However, it influenced other races more than they influenced it” (qtd. Francisco Morán 388).1 This statement, while it devalues the past of a colonized ethnic group, may also be considered an example of internal colonialism. Incidentally, in the same book Ortiz accuses the Chinese of introducing opium addiction and homosexuality to Cuba (19). Scherer has criticized similar flaws in other essays: “Although both José Martí’s ‘Our America’ (1898) and Fernández Retamar’s Caliban and Other Essays (1989) make place for the vanished American ‘Indian’ (that is, Taino or Carib) in their arguments concerned with mestizaje, they consistently ignore, and thus continue to erase in proper Orientalist fashion, the presence of Chinese immigrants on the island” (“Sanfancón” 168). Likewise, in another essay, “Nuestra América y Occidente” (Our America and the West), Fernández Retamar simultaneously defends the “Americanness” of blacks and Amerindians while ignoring the presence of Asians, the third largest ethnic group in Cuba: “Indians and blacks, therefore, far from constituting Exclusion and (Mis)representation 135 bodies foreign to our America for not being ‘Occidental’ belong to it on all counts: more so than the alien and uprooted ‘civilizers.’”2 The exclusion of the Sino-Cuban community is also traceable across literary genres. Thus, while it is true that not much attention is paid to the Chinese in the works of Cuban author and patriot José Martí (1853–1895), he does mention a “yellow doctor” in the first stanza of the fifteenth section of his Versos sencillos (Simple Verses; 1881): “The yellow doctor came / To give me medicine / With a sallow hand / And the other hand in his pocket: / I have over there in a corner / A doctor who does not maim / With one very white hand / And the other on his heart” (Selected Writings).3 Although the Chinese physician was the most admired figure of his ethnic group at the time, his prestige and symbolic capital had no effect on Martí: the poetic voice declares his distrust of the “yellow doctor”’s hands (the “sallow” one and the one in his pocket [i.e. with “something up his sleeve”]), and then professes his preference for the white hand of the Creole doctor he knows. The same disparaging tone continues in Martí’s essays, particularly when he briefly mentions the Chinese Cubans in “The Indians in the United States” (“Los indios en los Estados Unidos”; 1885):4 “Another of those in attendance has seen the Indians squatting in circles to gamble away their year’s pay, wagering nine out of every ten pesos they were given, just as the Chinamen in the cigar factories of a Spanish prison do the moment they receive, on Saturday evening, the part of their daily wage that is left after their debt to the establishment is deducted” (Selected Writings; 158–59).5 Yet in his 1871 essay “Political Prison in Cuba” (“El presidio político en Cuba”), Martí wrote about the Chinese in Cuba in a compassionate tone: I remember it [the prison hospital] with horror. When cholera was gathering up its sheaf of victims, the body of a Chinaman was not sent to the hospital until one of his countrymen cut into the ill-fated man’s vein and a drop welled up, a drop of black, coagulated blood. Then...