Chinese Beats… on Cuban Streets

A group of elderly men publish Cuba's only Chinese-language paper in Havana's tiny, isolated Chinatown.

Rolando Ziang Lian smiles when I ask why he came to Cuba. It is a long smile accompanied by the slow shaking of his head, a typical Chinese expression of self-doubt. Then, his eyes widen and he says: "I have not been asked this question for a long time. I do not have any visitors here." He then ushers me inside his office.

The spacious office resembles an old printing workshop from the early 20th century - something out of an illustrated history book. There are 10 rows of stands holding tin type-sets with Chinese characters. A heavy coating of dust make the faces unreadable.

I met Rolando sitting in front of his office at the edge of Havana's Chinatown last week, where he publishes the newspaper Kwong Wah Po or Diario Popular Chino in Spanish. He was friendly, and after a few pleasantries we became completely immersed in conservation.

He asks me to call him Lian instead of Rolando.

Lian has seen it all over the past half century - the ups and downs of an isolated Chinatown where he has lived and worked since landing in Havana in March 1950. "It was a decision I regretted but I could not do anything about it," he says.

With seven friends, including his brother Alberto Ziang Jureh, he has kept Kwong Wah Po alive for the past 30 years, the only Chinese newspaper in Cuba. Alberto joined the paper 10 years ago. Lian wants to keep the paper running even if nobody reads it, and with a circulation of just 500 that's not far off the mark. As he says, "It is a monumental thing that one needs to preserve."

The paper switched from daily to fortnightly distribution in 1976 as readership dwindled. Now only a handful of elderly overseas Chinese make up the paper's audience.

Lian jokes that the youngest reader of his paper is 65 years old.

The Chinese community in Cuba is dying, he admits with sadness. The average age of his editorial staff is 77 years old and no young apprentices are joining. Lian is the youngest at 69 and his brother turned 80 last week.

Nearly all of them come from the same province of Guangdong.

An immigrant's tale

As a 16-year-old boy, Lian was told there was money to be made in the paradise of the Caribbean, on a glorious island called Cuba. Havana, at that time, was the most prosperous and Americanised city in Latin America. It was home to the vast agribusiness holdings of United Fruit and its casinos and resorts were a playground for the North American elite.

Upon arrival, Lian and his brother worked at a Chinese grocery store owned by relatives in Chinatown, not far from his current office. With average sales of 1,000 pesos a day, the store was a gold mine - the exchange rate at the time was one Cuban peso to one United States dollar.

That all changed in 1959 when Fidel Castro's communist guerillas overthrew the US-friendly dictator Fulgencio Batista. A great deal of profit-making business on the island was nationalised, and increasing hostilities between socialist Cuba and the superpower to the north meant the steady stream of tourist dollars was a thing of the past.

But the Chinese community in Cuba endured, as it had endured Batista's own bloody rise to power and the proxy wars on the island between the US and Spain before that.

The Cuban Overseas Chinese Association celebrated its 110th anniversary on May 9. "But only a few people will be able to attend," says Angel, an editor who came to Havana straight from Guangdong and has never been anywhere else, before the event.

Kwong Wah Po still uses an archaic hand-set Heidelberg printing machine which must be at least 100 years old. All the news published in the paper is translated directly from Granma, the Cuban Communist Party's mouthpiece.

Lian is the only translator. He joined the paper after its sole elderly translator died, having just retired from a government job as an accountant. And while he calls himself "just a translator", his real job is much more encompassing. He chooses stories from the official press and also edits them.

The issue in my hands leads with a story about the Chinese government helping the Cuban government build a school. Lian says that from time to time the paper carrys stories that highlight the good relations between Cuba and China.

The first Chinese daily in Cuba, Wah Wan Po, was published in 1903. Two more Chinese-language papers were launched in the 1950s, reflecting a much larger and more diversified market than today's. Readers were either sympathetic to China's nationalist Kuoming-tang or its Communist Party and the local Chinese communist movement. Wah Wan Po was merged with the other two papers in 1976 under the banner Kwong Wah Po.

A soundstage Chinatown

Havana's Chinatown is a bit likes a Hollywood set. It is a small enclave with about a dozen restaurants facing each other across a narrow alley. Shops are opulently decorated in red with hundreds of lanterns and paper dragons hanging from awnings. Huge gold Chinese characters adorn front the doorways. To wait staff at Tien Tan Restaurant dress in traditional bright red zi-pao. One of the waiters at Zhou Ai Quo even wears fake metre-long pigtails.

Zhou, 43, is a first-generation Cuban-Chinese. He does not speak a word of Chinese, but he does a brisk trade in faux pigtails. He tells me he earns more than a local doctor - 1,000 pesos (Bt18,000) a month plus tips.

A meal for two with three dishes and a couple soft drinks at Tien Tan costs Bt1,300. No wonder the owners, Tang Xingling and her husband Carlos, are making lots of money. Tang came to Havana seven years ago from Shanghai, where she met her Cuban husband, who was studying Chinese. Tang says business is good because her restaurant is frequented by top party leaders and diplomats. Tien Tan has VIP rooms on the second floor, where those more equal than others can enjoy special service.

Tang knows Lian well. Indeed, the roughly 200 Chinese residents of Havana seem to all know each other. Another 100 or so live outside of the city.

Lian himself is a walking encyclopaedia of overseas Chinese in Cuba. He has a mental record of all Chinese who have arrived on or left the island. With his mastery of Spanish, gained from three years of schooling and a lifetime of conversation, he's been able to trace the history of Chinese immigration to the island by studying Spanish language archives. He says, however, that the oral histories of the people themselves and their neighbours have been much more fruitful.

Through toil and turmoil

The first wave of Chinese immigration, Lian relates, came in the 1820s when unskilled labourers were recruited to work on the sugar plantation. By the mid-19th century, the number of immigrants had doubled as demands for sugar grew around the world. When Cubans rose up to fight for independence from Spanish rule in the last half of 19th century, the Chinese population had swollen to 100,000.

Ethnic Chinese joined the Latin majority in the war of liberation - some 8,000 were killed in battle. A memorial to commemorate their courage and heroism is located at Linia y el Vedado, in Old Havana.

Lian does not have much nice to say about the current Cuban government. He confides that he hopes Cuba will open up economically and politically a bit more, as China has done in recent years. He says the best year of his life in Cuba was in 1958, when the Cuban economy was the most vibrant in Latin America. "At that time, Cuba was the land of paradise, everybody wanted to come here...Chinese, Indians and Arabs," he says.

After the revolution, Castro nationalised nearly every aspect of the economy, including his relatives' grocery store where he had been working. He was given his accountant job by the new government, with a salary of just 126 pesos.

Amazingly, he never received a raise in salary or pension in 40 years. "You might not believe me," he says, "but I still receive 126 pesos every month."

He supplements his pension with another 230 pesos per month at the paper. But his combined pension and salary of 356 pesos is barely enough to support himself, he says.

He has remained unmarried throughout all his years in Cuba.

At the end of our three-hour conversation stretched over two days, Lian says it will be hard to keep Kwong Wah Po running after some of the senior editorial staff are gone.

But with a shrug, he says with practised resignation: "That's just the way it is."