The Chinese Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution

[magbana]

THE MILITANT: Miami event held on book by Chinese Cuban generals
Posted by: "Walter Lippmann" [e-mail] walterlx
Sun Apr 13, 2008 7:12 am (PDT)
LA JIRIBILLA report on this meeting:
http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs1872.html
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THE MILITANT
Vol. 72/No. 16 April 21, 2008

Miami event held on book
by Chinese Cuban generals
(front page)

BY BERNIE SENTER
AND MAGGIE TROWE
MIAMI—“What other country can point to greater selflessness than Cuba?”
asked Edmund Abaka, a history professor and director of the Africana Studies
Program at the University of Miami. “This is detailed so well in the book
Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban
Generals in the Cuban Revolution.”

Abaka was the chair of an April 6 panel discussion about the book held here
and attended by more than 100 people. The book consists of interviews with
three Chinese Cubans who joined the 1956-58 revolutionary war that brought
down the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba. The three—Armando Choy,
Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong—all became generals in Cuba’s
Revolutionary Armed Forces and continue to shoulder important leadership
responsibilities today.

As the book describes, Choy, Chui, and Sío Wong each took part in Cuba’s
internationalist mission to Angola in the 1970s and 1980s to help beat back
an invasion by the South African apartheid regime. The audience here broke
into applause when Abaka read a quote from a 1991 speech South African
leader Nelson Mandela gave in Cuba.

“The Cuban people hold a special place in the hearts of the people of
Africa,” Mandela said. “The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution
to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparalleled for its
principled and selfless character.” Excerpts of the speech are included in
Our History Is Still Being Written.

The program was held at the Veye-Yo community center. Veye-Yo is a Haitian
rights organization based in Miami. Other sponsors included the African-New
World Studies Program at Florida International University, and Alianza
Martiana, a coalition of groups opposed to Washington’s embargo and travel
restrictions against Cuba.

Tony Jeanthenor from Veye-Yo told the crowd, “Cuba went to many places in
Africa—Africa with all its diamonds and gold. And the Cubans returned with
nothing but their dead. Others who went to Africa took the gold. Cubans
returned with their heads held high.”

Anti-Chinese exclusion laws
Winnie Tang, president of the south Florida chapter of the Organization of
Chinese Americans, explained that there is a history of the Chinese in the
United States that is not told in textbooks. “Chinese Americans face a lot
more hardship than most people realize,” she said.

Tang described the 19th century exclusion laws “that prevented our families
from joining us over here,” and laws prohibiting immigrants from China, and
other countries of Asia, from owning land. These racist measures were
written right into the Florida Constitution. After many years of effort by
Asian community activists and their supporters, revocation of the section of
the constitution forbidding “aliens ineligible for citizenry” from owning
property will be on a state referendum in November. If adopted, Florida will
be the last state in the Union to rescind such laws.

“The most important contribution this book makes,” said Andrés Gómez from
Alianza Martiana, “is to show how Cubans of Chinese descent were part of
forging the Cuban nation and the contributions they made to the revolution.”

“Those who hope for a transition from socialism to capitalism in Cuba are
absurd,” Gómez said. “What is happening today in Cuba is not because Fidel
has retired but precisely because of what Fidel taught us.” The revolution
is stronger today, he explained, noting steps under way to increase access
to universities for youth from the poorest sections of the population, a
high percentage of whom are Black.

Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of Our History
Is Still Being Written, explained that Cubans who made the revolution nearly
50 years ago were young people who “didn’t start as communists or
socialists.”

This book, she said, like many of the nearly 60 other titles on Cuba that
Pathfinder has published, is the story of young people who wanted to create
a greater degree of social justice. “That was what lay behind the
revolution’s early measures—land reform, a literacy campaign, the laws
barring discrimination based on the color of one’s skin, and the expansion
of jobs for women,” Waters explained.

As the revolution carried out these measures, it confronted the property and
privileges of U.S. capitalist families whose government, she said, initiated
the aggression against the Cuban revolution that continues to this day.

Waters paid tribute to some of the latest targets of Washington’s
determination to crush Cuba’s example, “the five heroes of the Cuban
revolution who have spent nearly a decade in U.S. prisons held hostage by
the American government to punish the Cuban people for having made a
socialist revolution, for their refusal to surrender.” The five are Gerardo
Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, Antonio Guerrero, and René
González.

“The book,” Waters explained, “is not about the past, although it is rich in
history. It is about the struggles we are involved in today. Through it we
can understand better why millions are in the streets in the United States
demanding legalization for immigrants, fighting for a world without borders,
for a day when we whose labor transforms nature and produces the wealth of
the world can cross borders as freely as capital crosses borders.”

Setback for rightists
Prior to the meeting, El Nuevo Herald, the mass circulation Spanish-language
daily newspaper, ran an article about the program quoting Félix Ismael
Rodríguez, the president of the Association of the Veterans of the Bay of
Pigs (Brigade 2506), the band of CIA mercenaries who assaulted Cuba in 1961,
and Huber Matos, a well-known enemy of the Cuban revolution. Both denounced
the book and the meeting.

“It is a book of communist propaganda that they have the freedom to present
here, taking advantage of the liberties of a democratic society, something
we cannot do in a totalitarian society such as that existing in Cuba,”
Rodríguez said. Matos said, according to El Nuevo Herald, that the book
launching was “‘an attempted diatribe’ by partisans of the government of
Raúl Castro.”

Over the past decades, right-wing opponents of the Cuban Revolution have
attempted, and sometimes succeeded, in mobilizing large forces to disrupt
and break up political and cultural events they perceived as favorable to
the revolution.

Organizers of the meeting on Our History Is Still Being Written were well
prepared to assure that would not happen this time. Despite the front-page
article in El Nuevo Herald, the meeting took place without incident, a
registration of the expanding political space and shifting relationship of
forces in Miami.

Responding to a question by a reporter from the United Chinese News of
Florida about political differences among Chinese Cubans in different
regions of the island, Waters explained, “The Chinese population in Cuba was
class divided, like other sectors of Cuban society. Some were wealthy and
fled to places like Miami and New York after the revolution. Others,
especially those who were among the poorer layers of the working class,
supported the revolution. Our History Is Still Being Written addresses this
real class struggle in Cuba.”

Abaka closed the meeting saying, “We all need to learn each other’s
languages,” and called for applause to those who translated the program from
English into Spanish and Creole and from Spanish into English and Creole.
“We should try to organize meetings like this every month,” he added, to
enthusiastic applause.

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WALTER LIPPMANN, CubaNews
Los Angeles, California
http://www.walterlippmann.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
"Cuba - Un Paraiso bajo el bloqueo"
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