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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Chinese and Opium Consumption in Cuba O pium had been used in China as a medicinal drug since the ninth century , hundreds of years before the European empires established colonial beachheads there. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began to use opium as well as precious metals, tobacco, and spirits such as brandy to obtain Chinese silk, tea, and spices. By the advent of the nine­ teenth century, opium use had become very common in China as a consequence of the deliberate dissemination of the drug by both Western interlopers and the Chinese themselves. The former included the British East India Company as well as French, Dutch, and American business agents. When the Chinese government later sought to stop the opium traffic, the British kept it going by instigating what became known in the West as the Opium Wars of 1839–42 and 1856–58. The continued trade in opium, forced on China by the victorious Western powers, yielded enormous profits for the British Crown and for U.S. and British business interests. The British used some of the profits to help finance the export of Chinese tea to Great Britain. The merchants who cultivated poppies in India also reaped great profits. Chinese opium use steadily expanded, and in the middle of the nineteenth century, when massive numbers of Chinese began to migrate to other parts of the world, including Cuba, they took the habit of smoking opium with them.1 While the number of Chinese who used opium may have grown ever higher during the nineteenth century, most users apparently did so in moderation, often for social reasons, without becoming addicted or harming their health.2 Those who smoked the drug in China did not sit slumped in seedy opium dens, with eyes glazed over, as popularly depicted in the Western press. On the contrary, users came together in social and fraternal halls that scarcely differed in any way from other well-ordered and respectable venues of leisure activity and social intermingling.3 The Chinese living in London at the end of Chapter 3 46 :: Opium Consumption the nineteenth century gathered in similar establishments to smoke opium.4 Moreover, an 1895 British royal commission charged with studying the use of opium in India also concluded that the practice was quite common but caused little harm.5 In the United States, too, opium was used in moderate amounts to treat a variety of medical conditions without creating patterns of addiction.6 Nevertheless, the fact that a considerable number of Chinese immigrants in Cuba used opium heightened xenophobia and contributed to their adverse treatment, such as frequent arrests and other run-ins with the law. Also contributing to the negative sentiment was the fact that Cuba received the highest number of Chinese immigrants of any Latin American country—according to one study, published immigration data show that 114,232 Chinese entered the island between 1847 and 1874.7 According to Manuel Moreno Fraginals, approximately 160,000 Chinese migrated to Cuba between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century.8 Many Chinese workers, known as coolies, were brought in to help fill the demand for manual labor on the island’s sugar plantations.9 A substantial number of others were imported to help lay track for Cuba’s rapidly expanding railway network.10 Chinese traffickers in human labor all but kidnapped their countrymen or enticed them to leave China with false or deceptive information . Such coercive practices had few differences from the African slave trade. Indeed, the coolies embarked at the Portuguese colony of Macao and were transported by companies with firsthand experience in the black slave trade. As with the Middle Passage, coolies endured subhuman conditions onboard ship, and many died at sea; others used opium to help them survive the long crossing.11 Furthermore, after arriving in Cuba, the Chinese discovered that they were obligated to work for eight years to compensate the traffickers for the supposed costs of the voyage. In practice, these coolie laborers were sold into service as if they were slaves.12 Many of the migrants fared scarcely better on land than they had at sea. As a rule, living conditions on Cuban haciendas were horrific during the nineteenth century. Although the Chinese looked down on black slaves, the two groups lived in roughly the same conditions and in close proximity to each other. The punishments meted out to slaves and coolies also differed little. Slaves who refused...

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