The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba

Abstract

In a short, provocative essay published in 1988, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak posed a powerful question: can the subaltern speak? Spivak rejected the notion that those outside of society’s loci of structural power are rendered marginal to the point of silence and invisibility. Subaltern experiences, she argued, were not only audible and visible but were knowable and heterogeneous. Lisa Yun aptly takes up this transformative call in The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba. Her lengthy research produces a fascinating, elegantly written, and careful analysis of thousands of depositions and petitions collected during an 1874 Chinese government fact-finding mission to Cuba (at the height of the anticolonial Ten Years’ War) to investigate the work and life conditions of Chinese coolies and intervene on their behalf. The Cuba Commission Report contains 2,841 coolie accounts of abuse, torture, and murder by contract holders and their agents against Chinese immigrants, many of whom came forth at great peril to make known to home officials a level of exploitation and inhumanity in Cuba’s indenture system that approached the surreal. Yun’s critical reading of these texts focuses close attention on the testimonies and interjects culí experiences in what have been the conventional tools and paths for apprehending the subaltern in colonial Cuba: the slave and ex-slave narrative as well as the premodern and modern structures of the emerging Cuban nation. Yun is especially concerned with complicating historic iterations of hierarchy, racialization, and violence. As analyzed by Yun, coolie experiences both recover subaltern lives and disrupt the linearity and homogeneity deployed in defense of imperial technologies.Yun’s erudite discussion of the freely entered, signed labor contract indicts the liberalist philosophical moorings of freedom, volition, and individual rights, which apologists insisted gave coolie laborers greater socioeconomic status compared to slaves. This is an important rethinking by Yun of nationalist histories’ Manichean architectures. Indeed, one of the book’s greatest scholarly contributions is that it challenges a monolithic historiographical portrayal of the Cuban body politic. Scholars have generally relied on a black/white binary that at once erases the Asian presence and obscures a more nuanced understanding of Cuban historical processes. Certainly, as Yun argues, such a binary produces static racial victims and victors as well as a self-evident transition from premodern to modern Cuban economy, society, and subjectivity. The coolies were often forced to extend their terms of indenture, jailed within prison/industrial labor complexes, and denied freedom papers and other commodified writs. All sorts of rights as seemingly mundane as the right to beg, occupy public space, walk in public, travel, work at entrepreneurial and professional occupations, and be released from contractual obligations upon fulfillment depended on the coolie’s purchase of writs that in turn created a thriving “economy of paper” and further subjugated and exploited immigrant Chinese. Their lives serve as testimonial challenges, argues Yun, to the normativity inherent to liberal philosophy.The final chapter peels back the layers of a 1927 book by Antonio Chuffat Latour, an Afro-Chinese Cuban who cast coolie and slave contributions to Cuban society in a single framework. Chuffat’s liminal identity, which both evaded and embraced blackness and Chineseness, informed his struggle to accommodate diasporic Chinese within the Cuban national pantheon. He spoke of Chinese patriotism in Cuban anticolonial insurgencies and raged about historic and contemporary abuse against el chino and el negro. In this sense, Chuffat joined other notable Afro-Chinese artist-intellectuals, such as the poet Regino Pedroso and painter Wifredo Lam, equally concerned with prying apart monolithic bodies politic by using the analytic tools of diaspora, class, ethnicity, race, and culture.One unsatisfying element of this otherwise rich work is Yun’s estimation that slave narratives and coolie testimonies are “transpirational” texts (p. 56); that is, much of their power is that they bring to public light what transpired in a violent colonial regime. As political interventions, however, the texts seem much more critical for coolies than for slaves. While the six-decade-long indenture system was damaged by coolie testimony, Cuban and American slave systems generally drew significant authority and strength from widespread awareness of their brutality, abolitionist efforts notwithstanding. Further, despite the book’s title, slave voices are conspicuously inaudible in it. Yun’s primary project to apprehend coolie experiences would be further advanced by better recovery of divergences and convergences among similarly positioned peoples. Still, despite this notable unevenness in subject treatment, this interdisciplinary work of history and literary criticism is a highly readable, critical scholarly innovation for studies of race, labor regimes and violence, immigration, and Asian diaspora experience in Cuba and the Americas.