Macau And Chinese Peasants -- Have Little, Bet Much

One of my classmates in college wrote her senior thesis on the movement of Chinese laborers before the turn of the last century. Apparently a good number of Chinese ended up working in Cuba after the African slave trade ended, and they were thereafter transported to Cuba via Macao.

Organized crime rings in Macao would lure Chinese peasants into casinos, where they would gamble away their life savings on rigged games. The casinos let them gain back some face by giving them credit to win back their losses, but they'd wind up even further in debt to the point that even their families wouldn't be able to save them. They'd get so far in debt that shame would overcome them. They'd also be threatened by the criminal organizations. Without a penny to their name, these newly indebted Chinese were then forced to enter into long term "contracts" for indentured servitude on sugar plantations in Cuba. They would not only lose their life savings, but would also be used to replace African slaves in Cuba, where the slave trade had ended many years prior. (While the contracts were actually supposed to be for a term, the plantation bosses in Cuba would find ways to keep the Chinese workers on for many years longer). The ships sending Chinese slaves to Cuba might have even been American, so there might have been some early U.S. industrialists involved but I'm not entirely sure on this.

I wish I still had the bibliography from my friend's thesis saved on my computer, but I've since deleted the file. It was a really interesting paper involving the history of gambling in Macao and Chinese migration. I'll contact my friend and send the bibliography as soon as I can hunt it down. If anybody else has heard of this, perhaps they can verify if what I've posted is acurate and direct everyone to resources on point.

The only source I was able to track down online was on the Chinese diaspora, which only varifies that Chinese migrated to Cuba through Macao in the latter half of the 1800s, but it doesn't varify what I had read and heard earlier on about how these laborers ended up on the boats to Cuba in the first place:

There are still people of Chinese descent in Cuba and throughout the Carribean. Apparently it was substantial enough of a presence that there has been some impact on the local culture, although I'm not sure if they formed Chinatowns and, if so, whether these still exist.

I can't remember all of the exact details of my friend's paper, so I regret not being able to speak on this subject with any authority. I e-mailed my classmate to see if she'd send me her paper last night, but still haven't heard back from her.

Shine Tone --

Thanks for checking in. Is Badger Hat slang for a Chinese official? Are you saying that most of the peasants going to Macau are government officials?