Cuban Chinese: The Coolie Ships, Havana’s Chinatown, and the Caribbean Diaspora

When the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended, the world’s plantations did not suddenly go quiet. Sugar still had to be cut, cane still had to be milled, and the price of a cup of coffee in London or a bowl of sugar in Boston still had to be met. What vanished was the legal category that had supplied the labor. Into that vacuum stepped a different kind of traffic — the coolie trade (苦力贸易, kǔlì màoyì) — which carried men under contracts that were not quite slavery and not quite freedom, from the crowded coast of southern China to the sugar fields of the Caribbean. Cuba received more Chinese laborers than any other American destination, and the human fuel for that engine came overwhelmingly from one small, rocky corner of Guangdong: the Siyi (四邑, Sìyì) — the four counties of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, and Enping.

The timing was no accident. Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century was becoming the world’s sugar powerhouse, and sugar was a crop that ate labor. As emancipation removed the enslaved workforce across the Atlantic world, planters looked for a replacement that was cheap, bound, and legally defensible — and they found it in the indentured contracts of southern China.

The numbers are hard to hold in the mind. Across the Americas, the traffic moved well over two hundred thousand men before it was finally outlawed — to Cuba’s cane fields, Peru’s guano islands, and the plantations and railroad camps of the British West Indies. Historians have come to describe it as the shadow of emancipation: a system that borrowed the forms of contract and the substance of slavery, and dressed both in the language of free labor.

Between 1847 and 1874, some 124,800 Chinese laborers were landed in Cuba. Nearly nine in ten came from those four counties, and Taishan (台山) sent more than any other. The story of how they got there, what they endured, and what their grandchildren built is one of the least-told chapters of the Wuyi diaspora — and one of the most remarkable.

The Siyi Source

To understand the Cuban Chinese, you have to begin in Wuyi (五邑, wǔyì) — the five counties of Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Enping, and Heshan, a stretch of typhoon-prone coast where the land could not keep pace with the people. By the mid-nineteenth century, Wuyi was overpopulated, famine-prone, and politically broken in the wake of the Opium Wars. Taishan alone would eventually count more than 1.3 million overseas Taishanese against roughly one million residents — a demographic inversion in which the diaspora outgrew the homeland. Its young men had watched a trickle of neighbors leave for California’s gold fields, and they knew exactly what those departures promised: one month’s overseas wages for a year of farming. The same stone jetties that sent men to the gold fields — Haikou Port (海口埠, hǎikǒu bù) in Duanfen chief among them — sent them to the cane fields.

Not every departure was voluntary. Alongside the credit-ticket emigrants who borrowed their passage ran the coolie trade — a system that recruited, deceived, and often kidnapped men into indentured contracts for Cuba’s sugar plantations and Peru’s guano islands. The credit-ticket system (赊单制, shēdān zhì) itself ran on clan reputation: a broker advanced the passage money, roughly fifty dollars, and the emigrant repaid it with interest from overseas earnings. The men who did the recruiting for the coolie trade were not foreign slavers but the coolies’ own countrymen: the 客头 (kètóu, “guest heads”), brokers who spoke the Siyi dialect, knew the clan lineages, and could turn a neighbor’s trust into a signature.

The pitch was always the same, and always a lie dressed as a bargain: eight years of labor in the Western Ocean, four pesos a month, free passage, free rice, free lodging — all of it to be signed before a Portuguese notary in Macau, which made it look very legal. The men who had already gone were pointed to as proof: Ah-Ming from the next valley was in Havana now, sending money home. The recruiter had a letter to prove it. The letter was usually forged, and most Siyi peasants could not read well enough to check. This was the trade the coolies themselves came to call 卖猪仔 (mài zhūzǎi) — selling piglets — a term bitter and precise.

Macau’s Piglet Sheds

Macau in the 1850s was a Portuguese colony whose real business was the coolie trade. After Britain prohibited the traffic from Hong Kong in 1852, the trade shifted wholesale to this narrow peninsula of whitewashed churches and stone fortresses. There, men who had walked in from Jiangmen (江门) after a three-day trek were held in barracoons — the 猪仔馆 (zhūzǎi guǎn, “piglet sheds”) — while they waited, sometimes for weeks, to be shipped.

By 1873, more than three hundred recruiting houses operated in Macau, and tens of thousands of people made their living from the traffic. In the sheds, men were presented with contracts written in Spanish — a language none of them could read — and told they were signing for fair terms. The contract, as a legal document, was a fiction: it existed to transfer ownership of the laborer from importer to employer, from one plantation to the next, for eight years at four pesos a month. When the term ended, a laborer was theoretically free — but there was no guarantee of passage home, and most never saw China again.

The Crossing

The voyage from Macau to Havana covered some sixteen thousand kilometers and earned the coolie ships their grim nickname: the floating hell. Ships built for three hundred passengers carried six hundred, each man allotted less than eight square feet. Cholera, dysentery, and scurvy moved through the holds; guards moved through the decks. Between 143,000 and 170,000 men are estimated to have embarked from Macau for Cuba; roughly 125,000 arrived alive. The other eighteen to twenty-five thousand died somewhere in the crossing — suffocated below deck, dead of disease, shot during mutinies, or simply thrown overboard.

And the men did fight back. Chinese accounts record at least fifty mutinies on the coolie ships — men who decided that the ocean was no worse a death than the contract. The most famous was the Don Juan in 1852, when more than three hundred coolies rose against their captors mid-voyage. The Kate Hooper, bound from Hong Kong in October 1857, carried 652 laborers who had been deceived into believing they were headed for San Francisco. When the truth emerged four days out of Macao, they revolted — setting fires, breaking up parts of the vessel. The crew answered with small arms, tarpaulins over the hatches to cut off air, and executions: five ringleaders shot on deck or thrown overboard, eighteen more clapped in double irons. By the time the ship reached Havana in February 1858, thirty-eight men had died — a six-percent mortality that passed, in the ledger of that era, for a good voyage. The average for those years was closer to seventeen percent.

The men who died at sea did not all die quietly. Below deck, in holds where the air went bad and the water came slowly, the sick lay against the dying; on deck, the guards counted and logged. The daily ledger of a coolie ship — how many fed, how many fevered, how many thrown to the sharks — reads less like a passenger manifest than a casualty report.

The Plantations

What waited in Havana was worse. Survivors of the crossing were funneled into La Trata Amarilla — the “Yellow Trade” — auctions where they were stripped, inspected like livestock, and sold to the highest-bidding planter. Most were marched to the sugar plantations, where the workday ran to eighteen hours under the Caribbean sun and armed overseers. To slow down was to be whipped; to collapse was to be whipped again.

The arithmetic of the system was brutal. Between 1860 and 1874, mortality on Cuba’s sugar plantations reached forty percent. Across the whole indenture period, historians estimate that fifty to sixty percent of the Chinese laborers did not survive their contracts. Suicide became so common that, by the accounts of the era, entire barracks mourned nightly. The coolies cut cane on the very plantations where enslaved Africans had worked a generation earlier — the abolition of the slave trade had created the vacuum, and Chinese bodies filled it. In Peru, where the work was the guano islands and the mortality was even worse, the pattern was the same.

The abuse did not go entirely unrecorded. In 1874, a Qing commission of inquiry led by the diplomat Chen Lanbin (陈兰彬) arrived in Cuba and took testimony from the laborers themselves — men like Li Ah Ming of Enping, who told the investigators of wooden barracks surrounded by skulls, of air that smelled of rotting flesh and saltpeter. The commission’s report, published two years later, documented the kidnapping, the barracoons, and the deaths with a specificity that shocked the Qing court. It fed a hardening of imperial policy: a dynasty that had once branded emigrants as traitors who had abandoned their ancestral graves (背祖忘宗) began, under pressure and dawning national shame, to treat them as subjects in need of protection. The Cuba trade was formally wound down in the mid-1870s — closing the single most lethal chapter of the Wuyi diaspora.

Yet even in that darkness, a thread ran back to China. In a pocket, a man carried a folded letter — a qiaopi (侨批, qiáopī), the combined money-order-and-letter that was the pulse of the entire Wuyi diaspora. On the plantations and in the towns, the coolies wrote home: I am alive. I am sending money. Tell the children to study. These letters, and the silver that traveled with them, helped rebuild the villages they had left. The remittances (银信, yínxìn) raised the diaolou watchtowers and the family halls of Wuyi, turning a landscape of departure into a qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng) — an emigrant homeland defined by absence and sustained by return.

Barrio Chino

Not all of Cuba’s Chinese stayed in the cane fields. When an eight-year contract ended — for those who survived it — the laborer was free, and many drifted to Havana. There, in 1858, around the family restaurant of a man named Chang Li and the fruit stand of Laig Siu-Yi at the corner of Zanja and Rayo streets, a community began to take shape. It would become the Barrio Chino de La Habana — the oldest and, for a time, the largest Chinatown in Latin America.

The community was fed by a second, very different wave of Chinese immigration. Beginning around 1860 and continuing to 1875, some five thousand free, capital-bearing Chinese arrived in Havana from California — the “Californian Chinese,” who had made money in the gold fields and the restaurants of San Francisco and now came to Cuba to invest. They opened the first large Chinese restaurant in the city in 1874, serving the chop-suey cuisine of the American West adapted to Cuban palates. They built grocery stores, laundries, pharmacies, silk shops, cinemas, and opera houses, and organized a chamber of commerce that functioned as a kind of stock exchange. By the early twentieth century, some ten thousand Chinese lived in ten city blocks; by the middle of the century, Barrio Chino sprawled across more than forty blocks, rivaling the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York.

The coolies and the Californians made two Chinese Cubas — the poor and the rich. The former coolies kept small businesses and worked the land; the Californian merchants married into wealthy Cuban families, invested in sugar mills, and introduced Chinese theater and a game of chance called La Charada to the island. Most of the poor came alone and married Cuban women, often Black and mixed-race; their descendants became the spine of the Cuban Chinese community. In the 1990s, the district’s commercial premises were restored, and celebrations of Chinese New Year and the anniversaries of the first immigrants’ arrival resumed — a community reaching back toward the traditions it had nearly lost.

The Mambises

When Cuba rose against Spain, the Chinese did not stand aside. Chinese Cubans fought in all three of Cuba’s independence wars — the Ten Years’ War (1868–78), the Little War (1879–80), and the War of Independence (1895–98) — as mambises, the guerrilla fighters of the Cuban cause. The wars were long and bitter: the Ten Years’ War ended in a truce that settled little, and only the final rising, launched by José Martí in 1895, would break Spanish rule for good. Through all of it, the Chinese rode with the fast-moving cavalry raids, fought with the machete when guns ran short, and took their share of the casualties. Their loyalty became legend. Gonzalo de Quesada, the revolutionary who was Martí’s right hand, put it in words that are now carved on the monument to the Chinese in Havana: No hubo un chino cubano desertor, no hubo un chino cubano traidor — “There was not one Chinese Cuban deserter, there was not one Chinese Cuban traitor.” The monument bearing those words still stands in Havana today — a small column that Cubans pass daily and most visitors never find.

The commitment did not end with independence. When Fidel Castro and Che Guevara came down from the mountains, Chinese Cubans were in the ranks again — and three of them, Armando Choy, Gustavo Chui, and Moisés Sío Wong, rose to become generals in the new revolutionary army, later co-writing a memoir titled Our History Is Still Being Written. The coolie’s grandchildren had become the nation’s defenders.

Peak and Collapse

By the 1950s, the Chinese Cuban community had grown to as many as sixty thousand people — the largest Chinese community in Latin America and one of the most integrated in the hemisphere. Havana’s Barrio Chino was the great success story of the coolie trade’s survivors. Then the revolution came home. After 1959, the new government nationalized private enterprise, and the small businesses that had sustained the community — the restaurants, the groceries, the laundries — were taken over. Most Chinese Cubans left; Miami became the principal destination, where they became Cuban Americans of Chinese descent. The community that had numbered in the tens of thousands collapsed to a few hundred ethnically Chinese residents; today an estimated 114,000 Cubans carry some Chinese ancestry, but the community itself has nearly vanished.

What survived was not the community’s size but its imprint. Cuban Chinese cooking traveled with the exiles to Miami and became part of the city’s restaurant landscape; a distinct Chinese-Cuban identity — carried in names, faces, and family stories — persists quietly in the genealogy of the Caribbean.

The Gate That Remains

Barrio Chino is still there. Walk through Havana’s Centro Habana today and you will find, at the corner of Dragones and Amistad streets, a gateway some sixty-two feet wide, decorated in the style of the Ming and Qing dynasties — one of the entrances to a Chinatown that is now, by most accounts, the smallest in the world, concentrated in a single alley of restaurants and red lanterns. A Chinese-language weekly newspaper founded in 1928 still limps along on four pages. The 中华总会馆 (the Chinese General Chamber) still meets, and a government-built nursing home cares for the community’s last elderly residents. The neighborhood draws visitors now — travelers who come for the food and the arch and the faint echo of what was once the largest Chinese quarter in the Americas — even as the people who built it have scattered across the Gulf. For the descendants of Wuyi, the arch is a different kind of marker: a reminder that a branch of the family tree went to the Caribbean and never fully came back.

The story the arch tells is longer than the alley it stands over. It began with two hundred men from Guangdong stepping off a Spanish frigate named the Oquendo on June 3, 1847 — the first Chinese laborers in Cuba — and it runs through the piglet sheds of Macau, the floating hell of the crossing, the cane fields, the remittance letters, the rise of a great Chinatown, and the mambises’ pledge that no Chinese Cuban ever betrayed the nation they helped build. It is, at its root, a Wuyi story — the same Siyi counties that sent men to California’s railroads and gold fields sent them to Cuba’s cane fields, and the diaspora they built is one story with many ports.

Continue Reading

• The Coolie Trade and Early Migration Patterns (1840–1874) — the system that shipped the Siyi men out.
• Coolie Ships Macau–Havana: The Norway’s Bloody Hundred-Day Voyage — one ship, one hundred days, and the men who fought back.
• Coolie Trade Peru Guano: The White Death on the Chincha Islands — the other great destination of the Siyi coolies.
• What Wuyi Workers Built: A Labor Migration Atlas — the full map of the Wuyi diaspora’s labors.

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Roots of China is a reader-supported project documenting the Wuyi diaspora and the stories of the Siyi counties. If a family story like the one above lives in your own history, we would love to hear it. Share your family story, or subscribe for the Friday digest — a single email with the week’s new articles and the occasional family story from our readers.

Sources

1. National Archives (US), The Voyage of the “Coolie” Ship Kate Hooper, 1857–1858 (Prologue, 2001). https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/summer/coolie-ship-kate-hooper-1
2. Arnold Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847–1874 (2008).
3. Lisa Yun, The Coolie Speaks: Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba (2008).
4. Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (2006).
5. Mary Turner, “Chinese Contract Labour in Cuba, 1847–1874,” Caribbean Studies 14 (1974).
6. Havana’s Chinatown and the Quest for Synergy, Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478091233-006
7. OnCubaNews, “In Havana’s Chinatown.” https://oncubanews.com/en/magazine-articles/havanas-chinatown/
8. 中新网, “古巴哈瓦那的唐人街” (2002). https://www.chinanews.com.cn/2002-10-17/26/232940.html
9. Wikipedia, “Chinese Cubans.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Cubans
10. Chinese Historical and Cultural Project, “Barrio Chino: Chinatown in the Caribbean.” https://chcp.org/Barrio-Chino