Unlike most if not all Chinese opera genres, Cantonese opera has a transpacific history that is associated with a variety of subjects: migrant workers, itinerant performers, maritime transportation, media technology (i.e., print, radio, phonograph record, and film), visa and immigration policies, and national and international politics (Lei Reference Lei2003:292–294; Ng Reference Ng2015:131; Rao Reference Rao2017:15). This history was almost forgotten until studies of its sociocultural particularities emerged in the early 2000s. The two documentaries I discuss in this review are complementary to the existing scholarly literature on Cantonese opera in North America; they offer valuable insights into the rise and decline of Cantonese opera in Havana, one of the largest Caribbean cities whose upper-middle class and Chinese population were sizable in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.

Discussions on Cantonese opera in Havana had been virtually nonexistent for over half a century until Pok Chi Lau (b. 1950) unveiled in Cuban Chinese the curious story of Caridad Amarán (b. 1931), probably the last Cantonese opera diva in Cuba. Although Lau released Cuban Chinese on the internet with the aim of raising funds for Amarán’s visit to the ancestral home of her foster father, this documentary short features various firsthand materials (e.g. old photos, snapshots of handwritten scores, etc.) that invite further inquiries into Amarán’s biography as well as how Cantonese opera travelled from China to Cuba (see also Ng Reference Ng2015:147; Rao Reference Rao2017:28, 307–308). In 2014, Kin Shuen Louie (b. 1951) published the Chinese translation of Amarán’s short autobiography together with his interviews with thirty-four Chinese Cubans in his Report of Documenting the Oral History of Overseas Chinese in Cuba. In 2019, Louisa Wei completed Havana Divas, a documentary feature film that made the Cantonese opera performance experience of Amarán and her friend Georgina Wong Gutierrez (b. 1929) more widely known through the international film festival circuit.

Amarán and Gutierrez would not have attended the Hong Kong Arts Festival as guest artists in 2019 had Cuban Chinese and Havana Divas never materialised. They would have been forgotten due to the marginal status of their performance experience. Cuban Chinese and Havana Divas therefore deserve serious attention as historical records first and foremost, but equally significant is their value to both public ethnomusicology and the knowledge of Cantonese opera as intangible cultural heritage.

No matter how much emphasis Cuban Chinese places on the plot of Amarán—a Cuban native—being influenced by her foster father to become a professional Cantonese opera actor, the film gives its viewers a glimpse of the extent to which Cantonese opera had been “frozen” in Havana since the Cuban Revolution ended in 1959. The snapshot of a poster hung on a wall showing the young Pak Suet Sin (b. 1928) in Cantonese opera costume is indeed compatible with Amarán’s onscreen singing of “Flower Vendor” (Maihua nü) and “Emperor Guangxu Laments for Consort Zhen” (Guangxu huang tan wugeng). The former is a song based on a classic Cantonese instrumental tune of the 1950s while the latter a Cantonese ballad (i.e., naamyam) first appeared in the movie of the same title (1952) starring Tang Wing Cheung (aka Sun Ma Sze Tseng, 1916–1997), a Cantonese opera wunderkind. Neither Pak nor Tang visited Havana as touring artists; their media appearances nevertheless travelled from Hong Kong—where Cantonese opera was most vibrant during the 1950s—to Havana, before the United States embargo against Cuba. The footage of Amarán performing with Gutierrez excerpts of Wang Baochuan—a Chinese folk story that was first staged in Cuba in 1875, and possibly even earlier (Rao Reference Rao2017:308)—illustrates how, as a bygone performance tradition in today’s Cuba, Cantonese opera could still arouse genuine enthusiasm from a handful of devoted practitioners. This is made clear in the brief but intriguing display of Gutierrez’s personification of the story’s male protagonist, during which she willingly uses a phonemic transcription to overcome her fading memory and lack of Cantonese proficiency.

Despite its exotic outlook, Pok Chi Lau’s recount of Cantonese opera in Havana is substantiated by various recollections disclosed in Kin Shuen Louie’s oral history project report. According to Louie’s informants, films and LP records featuring Cantonese opera stars were imported from Hong Kong as the most affordable and sought-after sources of entertainment among Chinese people in Havana during the 1950s, a period when Cantonese opera stage performance was still much in demand (Reference Louie2014:25–26, 111, 153). The same report also reveals that Havana-trained Cantonese opera actors were all young female of Chinese or Cuban descent, most of whom chose to pursue a new career in the early 1950s (ibid.:142, 144, 147). This phenomenon was barely known outside of Cuba (see also Linares Reference Linares and Kuss2007:113, 115) until Havana Divas traces Caridad Amarán’s relationship to Kuoc Kong Company, a Cantonese opera troupe established by her foster father and several Chinese musicians in 1939 with a hope to “mak[e] a home for opera in Havana so that they later would only need to hire a few stars instead of a whole troupe” (Wei Reference Wei2020).

Havana Divas is notable for bringing to light the important role Cantonese opera has played in the cultural memory of the Chinese diaspora in Cuba and North America. It is no less remarkable in depicting how, supported by an ethnic community whose existence was prone to economic and political upheavals, Cantonese opera lived a different life outside of its cultural birthplace. From Louisa Wei’s contextualised recount of Amarán’s collaboration with touring artists such as Fung Yin Ping (aka Siu Yin Fei, 1920–2013) and Li Fei Fei (aka Siu Fei Fei) in the late 1940s and early 1950s, one can learn about Amarán as an exceptional example of non-Chinese professional practitioner of Chinese performing arts. One also gains a better understanding of how a certain kind of cross-media stardom that traversed both the singing and theatrical stages (i.e., getan and xitai), and the film and recording industries could sustain the transpacific popularity of Cantonese opera well into the late twentieth century. Wei’s revelation of the friendship between Amarán’s foster father and Kwan Tak Hing (1905–1996)—a Cantonese opera legend best known for his onscreen portrayal of Cantonese martial artist Wong Fei Hung (1847–1925)—may lead one to wonder how Cantonese opera might look or sound different in Havana if this friendship had not blossomed. Wei’s sketch of Amarán’s affinity with So Chow Lai)—a San Francisco-based Cantonese opera diva who nearly convinced Amarán to pursue an acting career in the United States—rather hints at a call for further study of Cantonese opera from the perspectives of homosociality (see also Ng Reference Ng2015:188) and gendered stardom (see also Rao Reference Rao2017:84–86). Overall, Wei’s thoughtful treatment of various forms of music-and-performance-related historical and ethnographic data renders Havana Divas useful for education and research purposes among ethnomusicologists and other humanities scholars who are interested in the cultural and musical lives of the Chinese diaspora.