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Kathleen López , Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (Chapel Hill, NC : University of North Carolina Press , 2013), pp. ix + 339, $69.95, $29.95 pb.
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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...