Introduction
On the same day as today in the year 1847, 177 years ago, in the port of Havana (then the Spanish colony of Cuba), a ship of the shipping company Zulueta & Co., based in London and owned by the Basque trader and slaver Julián de Zulueta y Amondo, disembarked the first contingent of Chinese workers, made up of 571 people, who would be destined for the colonial agricultural exploitations (the ingenios). That collective, which would be called “culies”, during the following years would increase to around 20,000 people, and would be subjected to a legal and economic regime that bordered on slavery. According to the researchers who have studied this phenomenon, the importation of coolie labor was the landowners’ response to the “black fear” (the slave rebellion that had occurred three years earlier, in 1844).
Chinese immigration to Havana
This practice had little success. Partly because the Chinese Mandarin monarchy opposed those practices and threatened a major diplomatic conflict. However, during the next thirty years, hundreds of fast merchant ships (called “clippers”) made the crossing between the ports of Macao (a Portuguese colony in the Far East) and Havana. According to the researchers of the phenomenon themselves, those “slavery” ships transported between 450 and 975 slaves per trip, in subhuman conditions, and with a mortality rate, on the high seas, of around 15%. From 1852, that traffic of people would become, for the most part, controlled by the Andalusian businessman and slave owner Rafael Rodríguez Torices, owner of the Empresa de Colonización Asiatica.
Family connections
Julián de Zulueta y Amondo, owner of the ship that disembarked the first Chinese workers in Havana, was married to a granddaughter of Salvador Samà y Martí, a Catalan trader and slaver who had made his fortune in Cuba. Samà was one of the most prominent members of the Catalan colony of Cuba and was part of a plot of illegal trafficking of African and Asian people, directed by Queen Maria Cristina de Borbó and participated by the most prominent elements of the civil administration and Spanish military.
conclusion
Chinese immigration to Havana in the 19th century was a complex and controversial phenomenon. Despite subhuman conditions and a legal regime that resembled slavery, the arrival of Chinese laborers was a response by landlords to the “black fear” and had a significant impact on the economy and society of the havana This story reminds us of the complexity of colonial relations and the family connections that influenced this migratory phenomenon.