Once-bustling district centers on single street
By Mike Williams
Cox International Correspondent
Published on: 08/26/07
Havana, Cuba —- The tourists who come to Havana for cigars, mojitos and
a dose of Latin American culture sometimes get a shock when they take a
turn near the famous Partagas Cigar factory and find themselves standing
beneath a huge arch that resembles the roof of a Chinese pagoda.
The arch is the entrance to Havana's famed "Barrio Chino," or Chinatown,
a once-thriving district that for decades hummed with life and added a
colorful accent to the city's colonial architecture.
These days Havana's Chinatown is only a shadow of its former self,
centering on a single street of brightly painted restaurants catering to
tourists and the handful of new Chinese immigrants who have emigrated as
trade relations between China and Cuba grow.
But ambitious restoration plans are afoot, and Cubans seem proud of the
little-known part that Chinese immigrants played in the Caribbean
island's past.
"I'm Cuban-Chinese," said Julio Wu, 34, a waiter at one of the
district's restaurants. "There are only a few pure-blooded Chinese left,
because the immigrants who came were mostly men. They had to marry Cuban
women because there weren't many Chinese women. That's what my father did."
Chinese immigrants first came to Cuba in the middle 1800s, lured to the
island to labor on railroads, construction projects and sugar plantations.
Eventually about 100,000 Chinese arrived in Cuba, most working at first
in the rural provinces. Over the years they gravitated to Havana, where
the Chinatown district became one of the hemisphere's largest, a
44-square-block neighborhood brimming with restaurants, shops, laundries
and other businesses.
It also became known as part of Havana's famed red-light district, which
in the 1940s and 1950s catered to partying Americans who flocked to Cuba
to enjoy gambling and risque nightclub acts.
But Cuba's Chinese population dwindled after the 1959 revolution. Many
Chinese business owners left the island, moving to the United States or
other Latin American capitals because they were unhappy with property
confiscations and the new socialist government.
Chinatown fell into disrepair, and the number of pure-blooded Chinese
Cubans dwindled to a few hundred.
A revival came a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and
the loss of billions of dollars in subsidies in the early 1990s as Cuba
turned to tourism to rescue its shaken economy. The arch leading into
Chinatown was built and Chinese restaurants were encouraged to open as a
tourist draw.
Street signs with dragons were hung from corners in the district, and
there are plans for a museum highlighting the role of Chinese immigrants
in Cuban history.
Dahlia Cuan, 72, came to Cuba as a girl in the 1940s with her father,
who opened a general merchandise store in Santa Clara, about 100 miles
east of Havana. Eventually the family moved to the capital, and Cuan
worked as a manager for a Chinese-language newspaper.
"There are only a few hundred of us pure Chinese left," she said. "But
there are thousands of mixed Cuban-Chinese, and they are in every part
of society, as engineers, teachers, even military men. I'm glad they are
restoring Chinatown ... it is an important part of Cuba's history."
While some Cuban Chinese seem nostalgic for the neighborhood's past,
many are also optimistic about China's growing importance to Cuba.
Chinese officials and businessmen visit frequently to set up trade
deals, and a tiny number of new Chinese immigrants are making their way
to Cuba.
"I came in 1995 after Fidel Castro visited China," said Tao Jin Rong,
who owns Tien Tan, one of the district's thriving Chinese restaurants.
"There was nothing here in the 1990s, so we're growing. The Cuban people
are lovely. They are poor in pocket but rich in heart."
http://www.ajc.com/search/content/news/stories/2007/08/26/bdcuba0826.html
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