The term Cuban-Chinese is not an oxymoron, but my ABC wife is. Born in Shanghai, with a green card working since 2001.
A living, breathing paradox, at first she may look Chinese, but she speaks Spanish in addition to English and Mandarin. But how did she and the Cubano come to be? She’s a musician’s daughter who plays cello and GuZheng 2K year old guitar.
ABC signifies American-born Chinese and CBS Chinese-born Shanghai。 It is estimated that from the period of 1847–1874, nearly 150,000 Chinese contract laborers were brought to Cuba to supplement the dwindling institution of slavery. Essentially working as indentured servants, they were spread across Cuba to work on the numerous sugar plantations throughout the island.
Then, in the 1920's another approximately 30,000 Chinese immigrants made their way to the island. Just as Cuba’s neighbor to the north was experiencing the “Roaring Twenties,” the Pear of the Antilles was itself enjoying a very prosperous decade. The Chinese who immigrated to Cuba during this period did so under their own accord, and they settled mainly in Havana.
Consequently, Cuba’s capital developed the largest Chinatown in all of Latin America, and two very different cultures were woven together. Cuban-Chinese cuisine thus emerged as the contrast of Cuban and Chinese dishes served side-by-side on the same plate. What’s more, the inventor of la caja china, or “Chinese box,” which is so well-known in Miami, had the idea for his pork roasting box when he saw something similar while he was driving through Havana’s Barrio Chino in 1955.
After Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution, the chino-cubanos ultimately favored New York over Miami as the refuge of choice — breaking the pattern with Cubans of Spanish descent. The exact reason for this is unknown, but one can speculate that it had something to do with the similarities between Havana and New York, inclusive of the fact that Manhattan already boasted a robust Chinatown of its own by that time.
A comeback may be underway, however, as I recently spotted a trendy food truck near Madison Square Park serving Latin-Asian cuisine. Fittingly titled “Chicu NYC,” the establishment was run by two former marines-turned-chefs who wanted to resurrect the Cuban-Chinese cuisine they had grown up enjoying.