Published Version of My Paper

The book in which my a truncated version of this paper is published came out on November 20, 2014. Check it out!

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-organic-globalizer-9781628920062/

Representations of Chinese-ness in Afro-Cuban Music During Post-Soviet Era Cuba

I will be presenting this paper at LASA 2010 in Toronto in October. I hope to see you there!

Incorporating the Chinese into Afro-Cuban Religions

Because of the language barrier between Chinese-Cubans and non-Chinese Cubans and the inability of non-Chinese Cubans to understand Chinese customs, the Chinese in Cuba were often seen to possess mysterious magical powers, considered to be worse and more powerful than any of the syncretic religions of Cuba. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the significant cultural differences between Afro-Cubans and Chinese-Cubans caused the slaves to look at the Chinese contract laborers with perplexity, and the Afro-Cubans tried to explain these practices through their own magical-religious lenses in a way that mythologized the Chinese-Cubans. These images of the Chinese-Cuban would continue to spread themselves to the rest of the population through oral history, enriched by popular imagination (Baltar Rodríguez 1997:177). According to interpretations based on Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), it may be said that the wills and intentions of some of the Afro-Cubans to understand their Chinese compatriots certainly resulted in an interesting incorporation of their imagined powers of the Chinese into their own religion. Their oral tradition allowed this Orientalized image of the Chinese to spread to other sectors of Cuban society. Even today, in dark practices that have been integrated into Santería, the skull of a chino is said to be an important component (Baltar Rodríguez 1997:177).

Monumento a Sino-Cubanos...is it a cigar, is it a penis??

When my friend saw the first picture, she asked me if it was a cigar or a penis. It's actually a single column. This eight-meter tall black marble column stands on the corner of Linea and L in Vedado and was erected in 1931 to commemorate Havana's chinos mambises who fought for Cuban independence. About 2,000 to 5,000 Chinese Cubans fought against Spanish colonial rule. The dedication is inscribed in both Spanish and Chinese (in the third picture). In the fourth picture are the words of nineteenth century Cuban General, Gonzalo de Quesada, which translates as "There was not a single Chinese Cuban deserter, nor a single Chinese Cuban traitor"

Chinese Cubans in Hemingway

I had read Hemingway's To Have and Have Not soon after returning from my first trip to Cuba, and it has suddenly come to my attention again now that I'm working on a project on Cuban immigration into the United States. This novel was published in 1937 at the height of restrictions against Chinese and East Asian immigration into the United States.

In chapter four of the novel, Harry Morgan, a fishing boat captain who runs contraband between Cuba and Key West, agrees to attempt to smuggle Chinese immigrants into Florida in order to feed his family. Morgan then kills Mr. Sing, the person in charge of getting the immigrants to Florida, and instead of taking the Chinese to Key West as agreed, he forces them off at gunpoint at the closest Cuban beach.

"So we're going to run Chinks. Well, by God, I always said I'd run Chinamen if I was ever broke" (p. 48).