A Visit to barrio Chino in Havana

I was in Cuba three years ago and had a chance to visit various places on the island. The only regret I had was not able to visit Chinatown in Havana. I was suffering from air sickness and ran out of time. When Cynthia Yee of the Grant Ave Follies told me in August that she was going to Havana to dance for the fifteen or so remaining Chinese Cubans in barrio Chino I was gamed. I told her I would like to read poetry to them and she thought it was a good idea. So off we went, a group of eighteen (with Coby Yee, ninety-two, as the most senior of the Follies) tagging behind documentary film maker Yuanyuan Yang and her associates. We visited the Lung Kong Association, a place where the Chinese Cubans gathered for lunch every day. As soon as we met it felt like homecoming. Everyone was joyous speaking in their native Cantonese or Say-Yup dialects. Were we the long lost sons and daughters who brought back gifts like sour plums and Chinese opera DVDs? Were they the parents who prepared a table of food and tea and asked us to give thanks in front of the alter of  Guan Gung, their protector deity? Just as it occurred to me that when these folks (mostly in their seventies and eighties) pass on there will be no more Chinese faces in Havana, the sound of a baby girl in the arms of her very Chinese father (recently immigrated from China) gave me hope.

We performed at an outdoor stage in a martial arts studio between episodes of pouring rain. The hems of our long dresses were soaked. The Follies had to put tapes on the underside of their tap-dance shoes so they wouldn’t slip on the watery floor. They changed their costumes in a courtyard behind a bed sheet stretched between two plastic chairs on tables. We waited one and a half hour for the sky to do its thing. The audience waited with us, moving their chairs this way and that as ideas were thrown back and forth on how to proceed with the performance under the circumstance. Finally it was all or nothing. They set up the corroded mic and two aging speakers and on with the show. I found myself speaking in Spanish, reciting the translation of a Chinese poem by Li Bai. The Follies danced and sang and Coby wowed the audience with her sexy dance moves. When we finished the sun came out. Then it was the Cubans’ turn. We witnessed the last of the Chinese opera divas, Caridad Ameran and Georgina Wong (both in their eighties) dressed in full opera costumes, accompanied by their grand children on drum and cymbals, performed an excerpt of a Chinese opera. The event ended with an energetic lion dance, with the mother of the kung fu master, probably in her late seventies or older, doing the lion head.

There were more, such as meeting Cuban poets Roberto Manzano and Sinecio Diaz at the house of poetry, and the promise of future poetic collaborations. I was given much more than I had gone with. What’s installed in the future is moot, for now my life has been made full.