The series that tells the story of a Chinese slave in Cuba in 1860 had a spectacular presentation during the third day of Content Americas.
*By Luis Cabrera, Ana Paula Carreira and Fernando Moreno, from Miami, Florida
The series Coolie, the moving story of a Chinese slave in Cuba during the 1800 revolution, was presented today with a “trade premiere” held at Content Americas 2025.
The series is a production with an enormous Latin American presence and tells a story rarely told in our industry: that of Chinese slaves in Latin America, in this case, in Cuba, right during the first years of the Cuban revolution.
In the nineties, Meileen Choo, producer and showrunner of the series, visited Cuba and there she began to be inspired by the history of the Chinese in the South American country, slowly creating the story that would become Coolie.
The story of Coolie follows a young Chinese woman who arrives in Cuba looking for her fiancé, but finds herself in a very difficult reality for Chinese slaves, something that affects her once she is kidnapped by one of the villains in the story.
The narrative also follows other characters, such as Maria, played by Camila Arteche, a complex character, both antagonistic, but with a story that makes her easy to understand.
The series was filmed, in part in the Dominican Republic and Panamà.
“I was always very interested in the history of Chinese people who have lived outside the country. I began to read about it and discovered that there were Chinese in Cuba, just as there were in Peru, Bolivia, and other Latin American countries,” Choo said in conversation with ttvnews during the presentation.
“The most important thing was a report from the time, commissioned by the Qing Dynasty, where about 1,200 Chinese citizens in Cuba were interviewed to document how they lived in the country. The horrible treatment that Chinese slaves suffered in Cuba comes from that report,” she explained.
“I originally wanted it to be a movie, so I worked with a Korean-American screenwriter, but he was a man and I wanted to tell a story from a female perspective. So I dismissed that idea and, when I finally decided to do it, I looked for female screenwriters. I wrote the first episode and from there we started working on it,” the showrunner recalled.
“When we finished the script, after Covid, I met with our executive producer and he said: ‘it’s a period story, it will take two years.’ But I wanted to do it before 2023. And we did it,” she added.
The cast includes actors and locations from different parts of the region, as explained to ttvnews by its director, Arvin Chen. “I had never shot in Latin America and it was great. The actors were amazing but just being there was very nice. Even though we had department heads from the UK and North America, a good 90% of the crew was local, mostly Dominican or Panamenian.”
“We had a good amount of real locations and we wanted them to be as natural as possible. The sets we built looked very authentic and it was easy to film in those locations,” he added.
Regarding the story, the director highlighted its multicultural aspect: “I love these stories where a person must adapt to another reality, where there are two cultures colliding. Everything I’ve done has been multilingual, so it’s fun to work with actors of multiple nationalities.”
The eight-episode series is looking for a home on one of the main regional platforms and leaves the possibility open, within its captivating narrative structure, for more seasons.
