这篇文章写了宫廷诗,对立论和初唐诗人,文章是总结STEPHNE的书中内容,但不是照抄他的原句,而是用自己的话写,对引用给出了引用的页数,比较规范化.写到一定阶段就可写书评(REVIEW),这是比较难的,书评一般由这个领域的有名望的学者所写,有很多自己的观点,我只是学着写写,我贴一份我老师最近写的书评,发表在最新的全美著名的书评刊物上PATHFINDER,是MCGILL政治系退休教授DR.NOUMOFF所写.我的翻译稿也发表在最新的国内权威的中国图书评论上.
Commentary on Our History is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution [Pathfinder 2005
SAM NOUMOFF, Professor of the Department of Political Science, McGill University
While there remain many gaps in our general knowledge of the Chinese Diaspora, probably the least known is that of their immigration to Cuba in the 19th and 20th Centuries, and their contribution to the Cuban Revolution in its making to the present. The narrative presentation is based on a series of interviews conducted by Mary-Alice Waters, together with Arrin Hawkins Martin Koppel, Luis Madrid and Michael Taber.
In 1844 the Spanish Crown opened a recruitment office for Chinese in the coastal city of Xiamen, signing up young Chinese men to 8 year contracts at 4 pesos a month plus food and clothing. These contracts could be resold for 70 pesos. After the passage of eight years as indentured labourers they were “free” to return to China or remain. As virtually none of them had been able to save for the return passage, they remained. Spain initially deposited 206 Chinese, followed by the United Kingdom who planned to land 365 more. With seaborne deaths the number deposited in 1847 numbered in the neighborhood of 500. Over the next quarter of a century an additional 141,000 were signed up, with between 10% and 15% dying on route. To this number were added a few stragglers from the post Civil War U.S., while others moved from the U.S. after the completion of their transcontinental rail-road labour.
The overwhelming majority were brought as sugar cane and other agricultural workers, to replace the African slaves after slavery was declared illegal.
Spain developed an immigration scare in 1857 and capped the inflow of Chinese, although the importing of contract labour continued until 1874
The Cuban population of Chinese origin came to affiliate with Cuban nationalism during the 1868 unsuccessful War of Independence from Spain, when indentured labour, as well as slavery, were declared void by the nascent Republic, with an estimated 6,000 Chinese joining the struggle. Recognizing that the 1857 cap had failed the Spanish Crown in 1871 it suspended all Chinese contract labour on the grounds that they were enemies of the Nation. As I learned during my own visits to Cuba, the Masonic movement began to take root in subsequent decades and some more well to do members of the Chinese community joined, which reinforced their middle-class nationalism.
As agricultural labourers the Chinese men could not follow the tradition in other parts of the Diaspora to have brides sent from China, married into Cuban society with some ease. Notwithstanding this some Chinese families in the 20th Century followed a system of matrilineal endogamy, whereby the girls in the family could only marry men whose both parents were Chinese, while the boys could marry anyone. A colleague of mine reported one evening over a drink that he had some Chinese heritage but it was not reflected in his name, as his paternal grandmother, in anger, removed the name from the family lineage after her husband was killed in a battle against the American occupation. I have no data on the frequency of this phenomenon.
In the pre-revolutionary period, those of Chinese appearance or had Chinese names, faced intolerable racist exposure, being called narra {equivalent to the N word); China-Manila {after Chinese who came via the Philippines} as well as being excluded from private schools, beaches, Clubs and clinics. In the main, they were primarily shop-keepers and small merchants, although some became quite wealthy becoming bankers and members of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce; the most powerful among them heading up the office of the Guomindang [GMD], the Party of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The GMD retained its political leverage until 1960 when the Cuban government became the first in Latin America to recognize the People’s Republic of China.
Some Chinese escaped to Cuba from the mainland after the repression by the GMD of the Canton Commune in 1927. The most prominent among them being Jose Wong, who after landing in Cuba joined the movement fighting against the U. S. supported dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. Wong was arrested and strangled to death by a government agent while imprisoned. He was subsequently honoured by naming a Brigade in his memory, which cleared the Havana Chinatown of drugs, prostitution and gangsterism after the 1959 Cuban Revolution.
Before going on to discuss the three Generals, it is important to note that relations between the two governments and Parties of Cuba and China have not always been friendly. The rupture can be dated to 1965 with a dispute over the price of Cuban sugar, but in fact masked the deeper issue emerging in the International Communist Movement, that of the dispute between China and the Soviet Union. Diplomatic relations reached the virtual breaking point during the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1967 period, but was resolved at the formal level by a face saving formula acceptable to both sides. Relations continued to slide through the Pinochet coup in Chile, and the war in Angola, continuing up through the implosion of the Soviet Union. The changing global balance of forces led to a very slow amelioration of these relations. Let me add here a personal note. During the late l980’s during a lecture on Central America and the Caribbean which I delivered to the research institute of the Chinese Foreign Ministry my argument that there were many similarities between the Cuban and Chinese Revolutions was met with derision. During a subsequent visit to Cuba in the early 1990’s when I made the same argument the response was viscerally equal to the derision I had met in Beijing. It was apparently too early for both sides to forget the areas of fundamental strategic disagreement. Owing to the newly emerging circumstances, I recall from memory that through the 1990’s it became apparent that whenever the Chinese found themselves in some serious disagreement with the U. S. they would announce a delegation to visit Cuba. This was one way to pull on the feathers of the American eagle. Relations went from frigid to lukewarm to moderately friendly over the past 15 years. Currently China is providing long term credits for the provision of intra and inter city buss replacements and energy saving home electrical appliances in the form of refrigerators, fans and air-conditioners, plus transformers for more efficient use of the electrical grid. Cuba responded by establishing the Chinatown Promotion Group in 1993 and promoting the Chinese House of Arts and Traditions, revitalizing the Chinese Studies Programme at the University of Havana and by hosting the Conference on the Chinese Diaspora in the Caribbean.
Let me turn now to the central characters in the book; Generals Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui and Moises Si Wong. There are a number of common features to them all in the pre-Revolution period; they all came from small merchant backgrounds, they all experienced and witnessed racism towards the Chinese before the 1959 Revolution, and via slightly varying routes came to develop a consciousness of social injustice, they were all inspired to revolutionary activity by the assault on the Moncada military garrison led by Fidel Castro and 160 of his comrades in 1953, and finally they came to see the revolution as the sole means for the elimination of racism and injustice.
Choy was arrested six times during the underground period before 1959, Chui was severely scared by his separation from his mother who was black and unacceptable to his father’s family, while Si Wong experienced first hand the class exploitation of his rich brother-in-law who was head of the GMD.
In the post 1959 period they have each served in Angola; Choy as Head of the Anti-Aircraft and Missile Unit, Chui as Deputy Chief of Mission, and Si Wong as Chief of Logistics. Currently they each hold positions of importance in the Cuban Government; Choy as Head of the Havana Port Revitalization endeavor, Chui, as Head of the Association of Combat Veterans of the Cuban Revolution and Si Wong head of the National Institute of State Reserves and President of the Cuba-China Friendship Society.
Owing to the degree of racial intermarriage between Chinese and other Cubans, it is impossible to even estimate the number of Sino-Cubans in leadership positions within the society, save to say that it surprisingly large. Where that identity is possible, one can note the Ideology Secretary f the Central Committee, the Minister of Domestic Trade and the Vice-President of the International Commission of the legislative Assembly.
Some well to do Chinese who fled the mainland after the Chinese revolution in 1949 fled to Cuba. One colleague mentioned to me in passing that her father arrived in that period, and after hearing the first speech of Fidel Castro, again fled to the U.S., saying he sounded too much like Mao Zedong. His family remained in Cuba.
After covering the background to the Chinese presence in Cuba and the biographies of the three Generals, the book continues with a discussion of Cuba’s role in Angola, conditions of the “Special Period”, relations with Venezuela and the Education Revolution in the Battle of Ideas, all from the perspective of Choy, Chiu and Si Wong.
What is noteworthy about Angola was that it was exclusively a Cuban initiative; quoting Gabriel Garcia Marques that Cuba notified the Soviet Union after the troops had been dispatched. This is confirmed by an old friend who was stationed in Eastern Europe at the time, who informed me that on a specified date all Cuban diplomats in the Socialist Countries were instructed to have an emergency meeting with the 1st Secretaries of the Communist Parties, inform them of the dispatch of troops and request specific aid from a predetermined list of likely needs; trucks from one, field hospitals from another and so on. Over the 15 years of Cuba’s presence in Angola, 375,000 troops served, with 2,000 killed in combat. Cuba’s policy was not to interfere in intra, Angolan fighting, but to insure that the real and potential intervention by South African forces be thwarted. Things were not absolutely smooth, as in 1987 Cuba opposed an Angolan government assault upon the city of Chita, in opposition to Soviet advice to go forward. Other strategic and tactical disagreements occurred between the Soviet and Cuban sides, both here, and I might add as well in Ethiopia. The guiding Cuban strategic principle was to never let the enemy choose the terrain of a decisive battle. These disputes must be seen against the backdrop of the 1981 intimation by the USSR that Cuba no longer fell under the Soviet “nuclear umbrella”. I might also add that during the 15 year period the USSR attempted to change the leadership of the Angolan Government Party, the MPLA, but were prevented from so doing by Cuban forces.
The three Generals repeated over and over that Cuba’s motivation for becoming involved in Angola was derived from the revolutionary heritage of their own struggle going back from the 19th Century to the present when Poles, Dominicans, Chinese, Argentineans, and North Americans all contributed to Cuban success. The most well known being Che Guevara, who proved inspirational while fighting in the Mountains as an asthmatic foreigner.
The Cuban economy has always been under stress from the outset, through the U.S. imposed embargo, the U.S. Helms-Burton Law, to the present policy of the George W. Bush Administration, not to mention the Bay of Pigs failed invasion and the innumerable assassination attempts against Fidel Castro. The USSR and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance [COMECON] provided a substantial buffer until the early 1990’s when the Soviet Union imploded. With this Cuba’s ability to purchase in the international market decreased by 80%. By 1993 the economy opened a bit, with tourism and some foreign investment. While this was viewed as essential, the wealth gap between those who had access to U.S. dollars and those who did not was accentuated. High prices in the special Dollar Shops was designed to absorb dollars and redistribute benefit through financing government programs. In addition to the obvious problem of inequality so generated there was a second consequence; most of the foreign remittances in dollars came from Cubans abroad, most of whom are white who were the disproportionate beneficiaries, as few Afro-Cubans left for abroad.
The impact of the reforms in China have had some selective impact on Cuba. Subsequent to Minister of Defense Raul Castro’s visit to China in 1997, he remarked that it was not a crime for a peasant to earn even 1,000 pesos a month through honest labour. An echo possibly of Deng Xiaoping’s comment that 10,000 Yuan rmb per year peasant family income was admirable. Subsequently vegetable production increased from 4,200 tons per year in 1994 to 4 million tons in 2004. Forms of production units became more flexible to include State Enterprises, Cooperatives, Basic Unit Cooperatives, back yard gardens and parceleros, or parcels of land which anyone can cultivate. In addition a mixed system of distribution was introduced. All of these program are to take place within the rubric of environmental protection and sustainable development.
It is widely accepted that Cuba has arguably developed the best medical education and delivery system in the 3rd World. In support of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, Cuba began to dispatch medical doctors in 1998, rising to 10,000 in number, who see a patient roster of 1.5 million per month. In addition sight clinics and dental services have been added. Supplementing this is an education aid program from literacy classes up through High School, and Sports training initiatives. Reciprocally Cuba receives petroleum products at concessional rates.
Problems of the “Special Period” have been extraordinarily challenging. In addition to the economic problems, the central problem is the need to cultivate future generations with a socialist culture. In the late 1990’s, there were 76,000 young people across the Island who were neither in school nor had employment. A programme for paying them to attend school was initiated as a response. At the end of the process there must be a relevant employment plan to insure that it is not merely deferred unemployment.
This book is a remarkable testament to the struggle for justice by the Chinese who migrated to Cuba, and their finding a place within Cuban society through their active participation in the Cuban Revolution.