“The original owners of those restaurants are very old now,” Yu said. “In addition, the second and third generations are not interested in the restaurant business. They want to do other professional work, like [becoming] lawyers and doctors.”
Yu shares a common family history with tens of thousands of Cuban Chinese in the United States. Their history goes back to 1847, when more than 200 Chinese men arrived in Cuba to work on sugar plantation as contract workers. The growing anti-Chinese sentiment on the west coast of the United States and the Chinese Exclusion Act, enacted in 1847, also forced many Chinese in America to flee to Cuba and other Latin American nations.
By 1940, an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 were living in Havana, Cuba’s capital, and other parts of the island. El Barrio Chino, the Chinatown in Havana, was once the most prosperous and densely populated Chinatown in Latin America, occupying more than 40 blocks bursting with Chinese-owned restaurants and other businesses.
But a communist revolution led by Castro in 1959 changed all that. The state took over private property and nationalized all private-owned businesses. Most Chinese fled overseas and many settled in Miami and New York . . .
