Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture

Epilogue

Epilogue The unsung and relatively prosaic lives of “legitimate” Chinese and people of Chinese descent are just as fascinating as those of Wifredo Lam, Regino Pedroso, Flora Fong, and other well-known Chinese Cubans.1 The recording of their testimonies is, therefore, a valuable resource in apprehending the ever-changing world of the Chinese Cubans and their diaspora from the point of view of the protagonists themselves. I will now summarize some of the information gathered from different interviews with members of the Sino-Cuban communities in Cuba and the United States. Most of the Chinese and their descendants in Havana considered Alejandro Chiu Wong, the eighty-year-old president of the Lung Kong Society in Cuba and vice-president of the Pan-American Lung Kong Association who died in 2007, one of the main leaders of the colony. He generously invited me to eat lunch in the restaurant of the society (several Chinese societies have restaurants, some of them quite successful, as is the Chan Li Po), together with four other members of the society. His clan society, located in Calle Dragones Number 364, provides free meals for elderly Chinese. This service was created by the Chinatown Promotional Group during the Special Period to assist elderly Chinese men and women who were in desperate need of help. As María del Carmen Wong pointed out during this interview, before 1991 Chinese societies were not very active and sponsored almost no social activities. In 1991, however, Chiu contributed his own money to create a free kitchen for the elderly and to revitalize Chinatown and its societies. He also won a first-place prize at an event dedicated to tourism with a presentation in which he maintained that the revitalization of Chinatown would create an excellent source of income. The opening of the societies to everyone of Chinese descent in 1985 also contributed to the revitalization of the barrio chino. Chiu was born in Canton and, before he migrated to Cuba to become a merchant in 1953, he had a wife and four children in Hong Kong, where he grew up and worked in the film industry. His wife and children moved to San Francisco, California, and the children still visit him once or twice a year. Once in Cuba, Chiu married another woman and had three more children. As he explains in Spanish with a heavy Chinese accent, “after the Revolution, most of the Chinese left the country, especially the richest. Those who stayed 156 Epilogue were poorer and most were married.”2 However, he decided to stay and to hand his little business over to a revolution that he fully endorsed: “I was in the Cuban army for twenty years, and during the Missile Crisis of October 1960, I was in the trenches,” he states proudly.3 A perennial figure in the Chung Wah Casino is Luis Chao, a native Chinese from Canton who arrived in Cuba in 1953 at the age of fourteen. He is a man of few words who agreed to answer my questions on the condition that I asked only personal questions: he refuses to answer questions dealing with the casino, Chinatown, or politics. While reading one of the outdated newspapers donated by the Chinese embassy, Luis explained that when he arrived in Cuba he was hired by his uncle, who had a Chinese restaurant.4 It took him an entire day of traveling to arrive in Hong Kong, whence he embarked for Cuba. Luis had a son with a Cuban woman, but they live abroad now. Although it took him a long time to learn Spanish, he earned a degree in chemistry at the University of Havana with the generous help of his Cuban classmates. Luis is the only board member of the casino who holds a university degree. He also works as the administrator of the Chung Wah Pharmacy and as president of the Ching Tak Tong Clan Society. For most of his life he lived in Havana’s Marianao District, but he moved to Chinatown in 1985. For years, he would go to the casino to send remittances to China, but all his family members there have now passed away. Of all the people I interviewed in Cuba, Luis is undoubtedly the most nostalgic: although his life improved after he emigrated to Cuba, he considers himself Chinese (not Cuban) and states that the two most important things in his life are, first, his health and, second, China. In 1996, he returned to...