Koreans of Cuba: In Search of Pacific-Caribbean Decoloniality
By Jeong Eun Annabel We
In a speech given in 1978 for the International Tribute to Frantz Fanon, held as a special meeting of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid, C.L.R. James made the following remarks: “At the end, the moment Fanon heard that in the Caribbean Cuba was free and the other countries were gaining independence, he said then he would go back to struggle there with them. I feel that today there would be no place for Fanon working elsewhere. He would be in the Caribbean, where he was born, bringing the knowledge that he had had and giving to the people of his own country all that he had in him and all that he had learnt” (46). Seventeen years after Fanon’s untimely passing, James imagined a revolution that had finally come home and spread to all of the West Indies.
Fanon had devoted himself, along with James and others, to fighting for Pan-African decolonization in part because they could not at the time see its possibility in their homelands. Likewise, Korean Cubans found within the Cuban Revolution a process of emancipation they had sought but could not fulfill in Korea. This blog post is about the Koreans in Cuba who navigated a tumultuous Cold War geopolitics in the Caribbean and East Asia to imagine a Korea that never came to be—a decolonized homeland.
[Figure 1. Still from Motherland: Cuba, Korea, USA. Koreans in Mexico. Image Credit: Dai Sil Kim-Gibson]
Who are these Koreans, and how did they end up in Cuba? In English accessible materials, the diasporic film makers Dai Sil Kim-Gibson’s Motherland: Cuba, Korea, USA (2006) and Joseph Juhn’s Jeronimo (2019) explore this history and the question of the diaspora’s relation to their homeland amidst the entanglements of the Cold War. In 1905, over a thousand destitute Korean peasants, recruited as indentured labor on a false advertisement of wealth, traveled by ship from present day Incheon to Mexico. Working in Mexico’s notorious henequen plantations, these Korean migrants soon found themselves formally stateless when their contracts expired around 1910. The Korea they had left behind was no more, under Japanese imperial rule.
This was a predicament that many in the Korean diaspora faced across the world: colonized Korea meant that even if they were to return, they would no longer be recognized as Korean but as Japanese. As a result of this conundrum, many Koreans chose to stay in Mexico, rather than return to Korea. Indeed, some Koreans in Mexico participated in the Mexican Revolution (1910-20), seeking alternative cause and sources of income as agricultural work dwindled. Once the military phase of the Mexican Revolution had settled by 1921, around three hundred Koreans left Mexico for Cuba in search of better working conditions, although they soon discovered that their new working conditions were no better. This small but tenacious immigrant community, however, became the origins of what is now the Korean-Cuban community on the island.
[Figure 2. Still from Jeronimo. Jerónimo Lim Kim during the Cuban Revolution. Image Credit: Joseph Juhn]
As destitute workers under the Batista regime, many Korean Cubans supported the Cuban Revolution (1953-59), which dramatically increased the quality of life for the Cuban working class. Jerónimo Lim Kim, a Korean Cuban born in 1926, participated in the revolution and subsequently found work within the revolutionary government, eventually rising to the level of vice-minister of the Castro government, working alongside Ernesto Ché Guevara. Martha Lim Kim, Jerónimo’s sister, was also supportive of the revolution, which she credits as making education a possibility for her, enabling her path to become a university professor of Marxist philosophy. As the documentaries reveal, both Jerónimo and Martha were essential to the organization of the Korean community in Cuba, serving political, communal, and pedagogical roles between the Korean community and the state apparatus.
[Figure 3. Still from Motherland: Cuba, Korea, USA. Martha Lim Kim, Professor of Marxist Philosophy in Cuba discussing the history of Koreans in Cuba. Image credit: Dai Sil Kim-Gibson]
If we, the present readers, return to C.L.R. James’s remark on Fanon—about being able to seize the movement towards independence in the Caribbean and the case of Cuba—we can also think about the complex relationships that Korean Cubans have had to Korea, particularly as they have imagined a liberated homeland from the socialist and anti-imperialist beacon of the Caribbean. While many Koreans who left for Mexico in the early twentieth century could not return to a Korea occupied by the Japanese Empire, in the post-World War II era, many Koreans in Mexico and Cuba, as well as other parts of the world, could not return to a now liberated Korea because it was still not the homeland that they left behind. A unified Korea had now been split by the Allies into North and South Korea.
Repeatedly in Motherland and Jeronimo, several Korean Cubans state that for them, Korea is one. A peninsula divided into two by Cold War ideological and military tensions, Korea was no longer, or not yet, the homeland their parents and grandparents taught them about and fought for. Jerónimo’s father, Im Cheon-Tak, for example, was one of the independence fighters against Japanese colonialism. During the occupation, he raised funds in Mexico and Cuba to send back to Korea in support of the anticolonial struggle. Finding their homeland in a divided state and engaging in a civil war (1950-53) drove many Koreans in Cuba to seek a different revolutionary cause, the one that Cubans were immediately faced with in 1950’s with the overthrow of Batista by the 26th of July Movement.
Within the documentaries, to be Korean Cuban also made certain narratives more difficult to regale or fully capture with the continued framework of the politically divided and militarily opposed states of North and South Korea. For example, although Jerónimo’s role within the Cuban government had previously brought him to North Korea—he played a significant role in Cuba-North Korea diplomacy—it is only when Jerónimo visits South Korea in 1995 that the film Jeronimo narrates a proper “homecoming.”
Is one or the other a possible homecoming, if the homeland Jerónimo and his father believed in was one sovereign state of Korea? Similarly, Motherland explores another split that was created within the Korean Cuban diaspora – Martha who stayed in Cuba and firmly believes in the Cuban Revolution’s legacies, and her sister Ceceilia who left for Miami and holds opposing views on Cuban politics. Ideological differences remain entrenched within families and throughout the Cuban Korean diaspora, leading many in both films to wonder what it means to be Korean and Cuban.
Korea and Cuba are two sites that today continue to be caught up in Cold War legacies. One became a divided country with ideological and military oppositions, and the other became a sovereign socialist state put under a severe US-imposed economic embargo. Similarly, the everyday lives of North Koreans have also been impacted by the sanctions imposed by the U.S. Following James, for us to think of Koreans in Cuba is also to think about the visions of Korea from Cuba that never came to be, and whether Martha and Jerónimo would have been able to “[bring] the knowledge that [they] had had and giving to the people of [their] own country all that [they] had in [them] and all that [they] had learnt,” as James imagines Fanon would have had, but could not. What would it have meant to envision Korea’s decolonization in relation to Caribbean sites and histories, to shift its geography of reason?
References
James, C.L.R. “Fanon and the Caribbean.” International Tribute to Frantz Fanon: Record of the Special meeting of the United Nations Special Committee against Apartheid (1978): 43-46.
Jeronimo. Directed by Joseph Juhn, Diaspora Film Production, 2019.
Motherland: Cuba Korea USA. Directed by Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, Women Make Movies, 2006.
Dr. Jeong Eun Annabel We is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. Her current book project engages questions of decolonization and immobility in Korean and diasporic literature and culture through a transpacific framework. Her work appears in the journals ACTA Koreana, Bandung: the Journal of the Global South, Cultural Dynamics, GLQ, Journal of Korean Studies, and American Quarterly, and in the anthologies Decolonising the University and Routledge Companion to Postcolonial and Decolonial Literature.