Cuba's Chinatown

[Randy W]

in the SCMP

 

Tens of thousands of Chinese moved to Cuba before Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, now just 111 of these first-generation migrants remain.

As China’s premier heads to Havana for a landmark visit, This Week In Asia points the spotlight on this largely forgotten diaspora.

 

 

Lost in Cuba: China’s ‘forgotten diaspora’

As China’s premier heads to Cuba for landmark visit, an overlooked community hopes they too can benefit from new era of Chinese influence

 

 

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Choy Chao Wong was just a boy when his family turned their backs on a newly communist China to pursue a better, more prosperous life in the New World.

It was the early 1950s and his family, from Kaping, Guangdong province, had fled the country following Mao Zedong’s declaration of the People’s Republic, to settle briefly in Hong Kong – then still a British colony – before setting their sights on a new start in what was then the world’s No 1 sugar producing country: Cuba.

Little could the 13-year-old Choy have realised as he boarded the plane at Kai Tak airport he would be substituting one communist revolution for another.

“When I was on board, I thought I would be returning [to Hong Kong] soon,” Choy, now 78, recalls. “But I was never able to go back.”

. . .

Chinese trade has long been crucial to Cuba in light of the half-century US trade embargo on the island – an embargo that remains in effect despite recent calls by Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro for it to end.

 

But the glittering fortunes of Chinese-Cuban trade stands in stark contrast to the impoverishment, dispiritedness and neglect felt by many among the forgotten diaspora.

So far, the ageing Chinese migrants have seen little benefit from expanding Chinese influence.

“There is no business opportunity in Cuba yet as the country lacks purchasing power. It is still a socialist system,” says Dr Louie Kin-sheun, author of Far in Cuba, a book about the history and modern lives of the Chinese diaspora.