The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba

1. Historical Context of Coolie Traffic to the Americas

1 Historical Context of Coolie Traffic to the Americas We heard that the Chinese government has reconciled with those big foreign countries and those countries have prohibited the trade of Africans; how come no one tries to save the Chinese in Cuba? Why? The officials have made ways to make us slaves over and over . . . In all, when we die, we will have no coffin or grave. Our bones will be burned and mixed with ox and horse bone ash, and then used to whiten the sugar (Petition 54). —Ren Shizen, Dai Renjie, Liang Xingzhao (1874) The Narrative of Transition In 1874 there were 2,841 Chinese coolies who stepped forward to give written and oral testimonies of their experiences in Cuba. Of some quarter million Chinese sent to Cuba and Peru in bondage, this would be one instance of their mass protest via testimony. The perspectives of those such as Ren Shizen, Dai Renjie, and Liang Xingzhao complicate narratives of slavery and freedom and can be placed in comparison to contemporary historiographic interpretations on the subject of Asian migration. Their accounts provide an alternate perspective to the “transitional” narrative, which has facilitated the modern teleology of slave to free, black to white. In historical analyses of mass Asian migration to the Americas, particularly that of the Chinese, a narrative of transition has provided currency for explaining their emergence and function as subjects in slave and free economies and as mediums for “progress” and modernization. The utility of Asians in a “transition” narrative goes hand in hand with the racialized figuring of Asians as functional “intermediaries” between slave and free, black and white and has enabled the continued entrenchment of these binaries .1 Manuel Moreno Fraginals’s explications, which have served as a linchpin of Cuban studies and studies of sugar economies, map one version 2 Yun of the transition narrative in his portrayal of Chinese wage workers as constituting the transition from slavery to modernization. He came to the following conclusion: The slave trade did not allow for the modernization of productive mechanisms . Though this has been a highly controversial topic in modern historiography (especially since Fogal [sic] and Engerman’s studies), a detailed study of sugar technology confirms that sugar mills were unable to take advantage of any of the new production techniques developed by their European counterparts . . . The most illustrious economists and industrial technicians of the time came to the conclusion that it was impossible to establish a scientific system of industrial production using slave labor. The sharp drop in Negro contraband and rise of the consumer market coincided with sugar’s industrial revolution . . . The key to success was in Chinese immigration.2 At the same time, Moreno noted that the treatment of the Chinese was “a brand of slavery similar to that of the Negroes.” But the dictates of this treatment, he explained, were determined by the economic necessities of production, and by neither the “philanthropic nor perverse” intentions of the owners. Moreno emphasized that “in the eyes of the owners, the men who came to work on their plantations were production factors.”3 While this analysis explicates the logic of transition to industrialization, it also reveals the tenuousness of the transitional narrative. The narrative rests upon the submergence of lived experience or at least some normative justification of that experience, as anything else would complicate the imperatives of “progress” and modernization. In the nineteenth century, narratives of “transition” also lent themselves to characterizations that supported the clarity of moving forward from slavery. In nineteenthcentury Brazil, various factions saw Chinese labor as constituting the “step forward” from slavery to postslavery. Jeffrey Lesser has noted that rationales included those by “progressive plantation owners who saw the end of slavery approaching and looked simply to replace African slaves with another servile group, abolitionists convinced that Chinese contract labor would be a step forward on the path to full wage labor, and still others who fervently believed that Chinese workers had some inherited Historical Context of Coolie Traffic to the Americas 3 ability as agricultural laborers and would help make Brazil a more competitive player in the world market.”4 Many critiques have been forwarded that implicitly or explicitly complicate a transition narrative. Some directly address Asians in the Americas , such as critiques by Dale Tomich, Rebecca Scott, and Gary Okihiro. In a critique of Moreno, Tomich argues that linear...