Given the authors’ unique personal experiences and the title, this book will attract readers seeking answers to a major question: why and how did the Cuban Chinese community, a result of migration and hard work of more than one century and once the most active overseas Chinese community in Latin America, cease to exist shortly after the 1959 Cuban Revolution? The fact that this question is only vaguely answered in the book has nothing to do with the authors’ scholarship, but the political environment in which they wrote it.

Mauro Garcia Triana, a veteran guerrilla soldier and later a diplomat to China (chargé d'affaires and then ambassador, late 1960s and early 1970s), and Pedro Eng Herrera, also a veteran revolutionary with half-Chinese pedigree, have devoted their retirement to research on Chinese Cubans and co-authored the book as non-official scholars. They have also played a significant role in rescuing the history of Cuban Chinese from near invisibility. The book contains three chapters. The first chapter, “The Chinese in Cuba's Wars of Independence,” deals with a political history up to 1959. The problem with this chronology is that Cuba should be regarded as an independent country after 1902, although heavy foreign influence legitimated the post-independent struggles as nationalist. The second chapter, “Chinese business in Cuba in the twentieth century,” is an economic history of Cuban Chinese. The third chapter, “Chinese in Cuban cultural life,” tells the Chinese story from a cultural perspective.

In a striking contrast to the rich details and solid data for the period prior to 1959, the treatment of the post-1959 history in three chapters is far from enough, save some brief and sketchy lines such as “most Chinese families and their offspring were better able to understand the new situation in Cuba after January 1959 to adapt as far as possible to transformations that were by no means easy to them” (p. 132). What prevented the authors from treating the post-1959 history with the same degree of scholarly diligence? The main reason is obviously political: under the official control of the national history, what happened to the Chinese community in the 1960s has been a politically sensitive issue. Destruction of civil society in the Chinese community (such as independent newspapers and civil organizations), nationalization (appropriation de facto) of private property (from financial institutions on the top to restaurants in the middle and street vendors on the bottom), discouragement of the Chinese ethnic identity while promoting an “international blackness” to win support in the Third World in Cuba's confrontation with the US, and the hostility between Beijing and Havana after 1965 caused by the Sino-Soviet rivalry, all of these converged to put an end to the Chinese community in Cuba. One particular impact was the demise of Chinatown as a once thriving business district in Havana. The Cuban regime is still reluctant to open this history to discussion, given the current Sino-Cuban alliance and the official discretion of the history of the overall radical transformation toward communism in the 1960s.

However, compared with Our History Is Still Being Written (reviewed in The China Quarterly, 2008, Vol. 193, pp. 205–206), an ideological rhetoric instead of a historical account, The Chinese in Cuba, 1847–Now stands as a significant contribution to the discussion on Chinese in Cuba up to 1959. Both books’ authors participated in the revolution, are either ethnic Chinese (partially) or have been China-bound in their political careers, and claimed to offer a revealing historical account about Chinese Cubans. Although both choose to avoid discussing the main reasons for and the course of the disappearance of the Chinese community after 1959, the former was written to justify the revolution, while the latter provides the reader with a rather detailed description of political, socio-economic and cultural life of the Chinese Cubans from the 1840s to the 1950s. For example, chapter one details how Chinese participated in a number of Cuban wars of independence (1868–1898) with specific names and numbers, lists the first Chinese Cuban Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s, and describes how the Chinese Cubans were connected to the Nationalists and Communists in China. Chapter two is full of data and statistics on many professions and commercial activities in which the Chinese engaged, and for the first time readers concerned with the subject will be able to know exactly how many bakeries, barbers shops or poultry shops (needless to say restaurants or laundries) were running during the 1930s, and who were offering what types of traditional Chinese medical treatments to their patients. In chapter three, the authors describe religious, theatrical and musical activities held in the Chinese community. The most interesting and thought-provoking part of this chapter is about Jose Marti's – the father of Cuban nationalism – perception of Chinese in North America as well as in Cuba, which convincingly challenges the stereotypical view that Marti was under the influence of Orientalism and thus was far less sympathetic to Chinese than he should have been. Overall, the book should be recommended to all readers concerned with the connections between East Asia and the Caribbean in the 19th and 20th centuries.