After Venezuela, China is now the second largest trading partner of Cuba. But although today Cuba imports a good deal of merchandise, from cars to electronics to foodstuffs, from China, few Cubans or Chinese know much, if anything, about their surprisingly interconnected history. Kathleen López's important study, which tells that history, thus fills a critical void in the traditional national historiography of both China and Cuba.
The book's eight chapters record the history of Chinese people in Cuba from the 1840s, when Chinese were first brought to Cuba as ostensibly indentured servants known as coolies but who worked in near slave-like conditions, until the present day. The first three chapters, based on pioneering work by scholars such as Evelyn Hu-DeHart and Juan Jiménez Pastrana, explore Cuban-Chinese history until the 1880s, when the coolies were finally freed from their indenture under international pressure. Chapters 4 and 5 then trace how the Chinese, once heroes in the Cuban independence movements in the last decades of the nineteenth century, found themselves facing widespread discrimination in the early twentieth. The most intriguing and original section is Chapters 6 to 8, as López tells of a second migration of Chinese people to Cuba from 1917 onwards, describing how these Chinese, a great number of them merchants and skilled labourers, established and maintained transnational connections between China and Cuba. Especially noteworthy is López's discussion of the Chinese-Cuban families and institutions that were torn apart, just like many Cuban ones, in the 1950s and 1960s by the Cuban Revolution. The book concludes with an epilogue considering recent developments in Sino-Cuban relations, the revitalisation of Havana's Chinatown, and López's personal involvement in re-establishing communication among the Luis family and its four stepsisters, two in China, two in Cuba, after 40 years.
López is not the first to study Chinese Cubans; indeed, Chinese, American and Cuban scholars have studied them since the 1960s. What is innovative in López's work is the transnational approach she takes, which is long overdue in both Chinese and Cuban historiography of Chinese Cubans. In particular, she makes critical efforts in tying the history of Chinese Cubans with the institutions they created that spanned the Pacific for generations. Implicitly, López argues that one cannot examine Chinese Cubans in isolation; the Chino-Cubanos must be comprehended along with their transnational ties, affiliations, loyalties and experiences, all of which made them into what they became, provided the source of their prosperity, and helped them grow into the largest Chinese community in Latin America created in the twentieth century. López decidedly breaks down national demarcations in the traditional approaches to Chinese-Cuban history, convincingly demonstrating that Chinese migration to Cuba was often much more than a unidirectional or bidirectional movement of people. As López shows, Cuban Chinese, particularly after the 1920s, were migrating and re-migrating to China, Cuba, the United States and other countries, as called for by political and economic dynamics.
The most important contribution of López's work is to be found from Chapter 4 onward. This part is essential in two respects. First, the work goes beyond the conventional concentration on Cuban Chinese before 1874, when most of them laboured as coolies in Cuba, instead tracing the Chinese in Cuba down to the present day. Second, it is also geographically comprehensive, venturing beyond the traditional focus on the barrio chino in Havana to examine the significant communities of Chinese elsewhere on the island that the conventional historiography has long ignored. Her work thus sheds light not only on the Chinese communities in major cities such as Cienfuegos and Santiago de Cuba but, more critically, on the interactions and circulations of Chinese throughout the island. This effectively opens up an area of research both in geographical scope and temporal span that although under-studied, nonetheless carries much meaning and implications for today's China, Cuba and their peoples.
Whereas a great deal of writing has reduced Chinese Cubans to impersonal statistical figures, faceless enslaved victims and poster revolutionary heroes, López draws us simply to a few family stories showing the human side of history. Although families were torn apart by wars, revolutions and poverty, family letters, remittances and occasional travel across the Pacific helped hold them together. The lives of Francisco Luis, Pastor Pelayo and José Bu, and many of their living descendants in China, Cuba and elsewhere, vividly capture the essence of the Chinese Cuban journey: how they came to Cuba indentured and gained their freedom, how they became part of the global Chinese diaspora, and how they developed into an essential part of the national identity of Cuba today.
López's work is a welcome contribution to both Chinese and regional studies as well as transnational history. An important first step towards providing us a comprehensive understanding of the Chinese people in Cuba, especially after 1874, her work further raises critical questions about the history of Chinese migration in general, and to the Americas in particular. Did Chinese migrants and their descendants in Cuba's eastern provinces, such as Santiago and Holguin, follow the same pattern as in Havana? To what extent did the experience of Chinese Cubans reflect global migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? These would be fruitful topics for further investigation, but before these questions are examined, we should thank López because la gente sin historia, as Cuban historian Juan Pérez de la Riva called the Chinese Cubans, have now secured a stronger voice of their own through this publication.
