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Un Tipo Típico

Alvarez Guedes Takes the Stage

I don’t remember when I heard my first joke by Cuban exile comedian Guillermo Alvarez Guedes. His comedy has always been in my life, hiding in plain sight. I came to this realization early on in graduate school when I sat down to write a seminar paper on exile humor and decided to listen to all of his albums. It was then that I realized that my father, one of the funniest people I know, had been cracking Alvarez Guedes’s jokes for years without much in the way of citation—a practice his son will not duplicate in the chapters to come. I didn’t grow up with Alvarez Guedes albums in my house. They didn’t play in the background of family parties, or on long car rides as so many others have told me anecdotally. His radio show in Miami didn’t reach my home in New Jersey. Yet there he was the whole time, appearing in the joke repertoire of family and friends.

As I show in the introduction, there are many examples of diversión from those early years of the Cuban exile community that I could have addressed in this first chapter: the lively theater scene, tabloid satirical newspapers like Zig-Zag Libre and Chispa, or folkloric events like Añorada Cuba. But Alvarez Guedes is truly the only way a book focused on ludic popular culture in the Cuban diaspora can start. What made him so unique was his durability and popularity across multiple generations of the diaspora over a career that spanned over half a century. Best known for his standup comedy, Alvarez Guedes released thirty-two live albums from the 1970s through the early 2000s. These recordings continue to serve as Cuban social and cultural capital. How many times have I heard someone say, “That reminds me of an Alvarez Guedes joke” and then break out into his or her best rendition? The embeddedness of his jokes is so pronounced that I have even heard people use snippets of his material like “tú eres como el tipo del gato” as a kind of metaphoric shorthand to describe a person or situation—in this case a pessimist.1 This popularity extends beyond his rank and file audience to other professional comedians on and off the island. Every single artist I write about in this book cites him as a vital influence. Starting with Alvarez Guedes, then, also provides a useful point of departure for thinking through genealogies of diversión in the Cuban diaspora.

Though his influence reverberates across generations, this chapter takes a much more focused approach through an examination of his comedy in the 1970s and 1980s. Even then, in those early years of his career in exile, Alvarez Guedes was looked upon as a kind of model exile subject. His standing among the community is best summed up in an article written by Cristina Saralegui for El Miami Herald in 1976, years before she built her talk-show empire: “Ahora, Guillermo Alvarez Guedes es EL TIPICO CUBANO EXILIADO (Now, Guillermo Alvarez Guedes is THE TYPICAL CUBAN EXILE).2 Alvarez Guedes’s status as un tipo típico—a Cuban everyman—is partially due to his politics, which were in many ways in tune with what Lisandro Pérez has called the “exile ideology.” Its characteristics include continuing to attach importance to politics in Cuba; hostility against the Cuban government; conservative, Republican political views; and general intolerance for those whose perspectives on Cuba differ.3 Informing what it meant to be Cuban off the island, this ideology manifested itself in a “behavioral repertoire … ranging from supporting right-wing candidates to opposing publicly anyone voicing sympathy for the Cuban regime.”4 Not content to limit his anti-communist humor to Miami, Alvarez Guedes travelled to Nicaragua to perform a set for the Contras in 1986.5

These politics informed Alvarez Guedes’s larger performance of exile cubanía—a Cuban cultural identity inflected with the politics of the exile ideology. But that was not enough to make him un tipo típico. More importantly, Alvarez Guedes reflected back what his audience wanted to see in itself: a wise-cracking anti-communist with a magnetic affability who could take the turbulence of exile politics and life in Miami and use it as fodder for diversión. Perhaps more than any other Cuban exile artist, Alvarez Guedes insisted upon a ludic sociability that cohered around a narrative of proud, pleasurable exile cubanía mediated through his humor. My research has yet to turn up a negative review of his work. In fact, I argue that people wanted to like him and what his humor represented—an almost utopic narrative of a united exile community that people wanted to believe was possible. His stories about “nosotros, los cubanos” (we, the Cubans) were narratives of unity around a broad notion of cubanía and anti-Castro politics, which served as a distraction from the very real tensions within the exile community. Old grudges from Cuba, past and present political affiliations, and disagreements about how best to bring about change on the island were some of the issues that divided the community from within.6 Disagreement and even violence among exiles convinced of their views as the best way forward for “liberating” Cuba were common. Alvarez Guedes’s albums emphasized common ground through hostility toward Castro, shared Cuban cultural characteristics, Cuban-Anglo relations in Miami, and the manner for engaging these topics through the recognizable codes of Cuban speech and humor. In short, Alvarez Guedes’s performances and persona were powerful interlocking sites of identification for Cubans looking to affirm their cultural identities outside the island in a way that put aside the tensions inside the exile community in a Miami plagued by drug wars, a slumping economy, and anti-Cuban sentiment in the 1970s and 1980s.

Far from simply serving as a cathartic release from the tensions roiling Cuban Miami, Alvarez Guedes’s performances illustrate the role of diversión in forging a narrative of Cuban exile identity that privileged whiteness and heteronormativity while simultaneously speaking back to discrimination from Anglo Miamians. It is in the messiness of popular culture, the way a derogatory joke about blacks can exist on the same album criticizing discrimination against Cubans, that we get at the contradictions that structure quotidian life. But before jumping into my close listenings of the material, more background on Alvarez Guedes’s performance practice is necessary to understand why he has been such an important figure in the history of Cuban diasporic popular culture.

Alvarez Guedes, “The Natural”

Alvarez Guedes was a mainstay in exile entertainment for decades. He released over thirty-two standup comedy albums, published joke books and novels, and produced and starred in a number of television and film projects.7 He co-founded a label called GEMA Records, which released the music of celebrated artists and groups such as Bebo Valdés, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Celeste Mendoza, Elena Burke, and Chico O’Farrill. When Alvarez Guedes died in 2013 at the age of eighty-six, tributes and commemorations poured in from Cubans across generations on and off the island. Despite having his material outlawed in Cuba, it has always circulated there clandestinely. High-profile personalities, including comedians, took to the Internet to express their admiration. Island-based Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez tweeted, “Maestro Alvarez Guedes! Know that here we have continued to listen to you, covertly, all this time!”8 In Miami, where the comedian spent most of his life, his death took over the news cycle for days, with bloggers, journalists, and television hosts covering his death and legacy, often through tears.

Although he is generally known for his work in exile, Alvarez Guedes got his start in the entertainment industry as a young man in Cuba. Born in Unión de Reyes, Matanzas in 1927, he made his radio debut in 1949 on programs ranging from dramas to comedies. In 1951, he debuted the character that would make him famous in Cuba, El Borracho (the drunk), on the nation’s nascent television network, CMQ-TV. Shortly after Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959, he left Cuba with his family for cities with large concentrations of Cuban exiles such as New York, Madrid, and Puerto Rico. He lived in Miami from 1961 to 1968 and settled permanently in the city in 1980, though he performed there throughout the 1970s. He began recording his standup albums in 1973.

Alvarez Guedes performed on television, film, and radio throughout his career, but most people know his performances through his live standup albums. All of these recordings essentially follow the same format. Once his trademark music signals his entrance on stage, he goes right into his material, usually by rattling off a succession of quick jokes. Two-thirds of the way into his performance, there is usually a shift from jokes to a story format marked by observational humor related to social and political issues deemed worthy of attention.9 There is hardly ever interaction between Alvarez Guedes and his audience (the Mariel joke mentioned in the introduction is a notable exception), but this does not mean that the audience is passive. There are no laugh tracks on these albums. Listening closely will reveal the running commentary of the audience in between episodic, raucous laughter, with approving phrases voicing agreement (“It’s so true!”) mixing with sounds ranging from high-pitched cackles to deep belly laughs. The albums were recorded in clubs, restaurants, or studios that Alvarez Guedes rented out for that purpose. The audience consisted of people he invited and their friends for a total of about thirty to forty people in all. The result was a profoundly intimate experience for the audience, which in turn is communicated to the listener of the album. The atmospheric applause and laughter audible on more contemporary standup albums is missing here. Instead, the listener can get a feel for the individuality of audience members and their unique-sounding laughs, their particular utterances, and the cadence of their clapping. In the context of the performance, these expressions of joyful approval sound Cuban. The auditory experience of these recordings makes it possible to laugh not only at Alvarez Guedes’s performance but also with members of the audience in a way that heightens the intimacy and pleasure of communal identification that he himself sought to cultivate.

As the description of the recordings above suggests, the album format begs for a consideration of the way the performance sounds. Identification takes place on the auditory level: it includes Alvarez Guedes’s routine, the distinctive musical accompaniment, and the audience’s reactions. For listeners familiar with Cuban speech (dialect, voice inflection, modes of expression) Alvarez Guedes would be instantly recognizable as Cuban without him ever saying so. His use of pauses in his stories, the way he exaggerates the pronunciation of certain words, and the strategic use of repetition contribute to the Cuban feel of the auditory experience. As he begins to speak, it becomes clear to his audience that he is Cuban, someone who has endured a set of historical circumstances around exile similar to what they have experienced. Confident and convincing in his role as un tipo típico, he offsets the precariousness and impotence of the exile condition through the creation of a stable, relaxed, inviting space where his performance functions as a means for negotiating the at times difficult experience of exile through diversión. The pleasures of group identification and playful narrative technique combine to produce a ludic sociability among an audience now comfortable with temporarily suspending its usual defensive positions regarding Cuba and the complexities of exile life.

Figure 1.1. Alvarez Guedes performing for audience. Date unknown. Courtesy of Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.

While his albums and performances quickly became hits among exiles, success did not come immediately for the comedian after leaving the island. In a 2007 interview titled “Guillermo Álvarez Guedes, El Natural,” he describes the difficulty in finding work in the Spanish-language entertainment industry during those early years of exile in the 1960s and 1970s: “To make a living as an actor in those days, you had to be an actor in television soap operas, and to work in television soap operas, you had to have what they called a neutral accent. When they told me that I said, ‘What the hell is a neutral accent? I have a Cuban accent; I don’t know what it means to speak neutrally.’ ”10 This hostility to the entertainment industry’s demand that he tame his tongue created the foundation for his career in exile. Throughout this interview, Alvarez Guedes constantly refers to his commitment to performing “naturally”—a performance practice marked by his use of Cuban vernacular, specifically the corpus of “bad words” that he believed to be authentically Cuban and that lend a quality of “realism” to his artistic production.

The idea of a “natural” cubanía followed Alvarez Guedes throughout his career in exile. His fans and Cuban cultural commentators have long used the term to describe him. Carlos Alberto Montaner, a major voice in the exile community, wrote a short piece published on the back of the Alvarez Guedes 4 album sleeve in celebration of the comedian’s “pasmosa naturalidad” (astonishing naturalness).11 Emilio Ichikawa, journalist and commentator on all things Cuban on and off the island, similarly alludes to the quintessential cubanía of Alvarez Guedes by naming him “nuestro antropólogo mayor” (our great anthropologist), a man who has “penetrated the codes of Cubanity” and who “doesn’t fail to measure the psychophysical temperature of the community.”12 After his death, press coverage echoed sentiments expressed by journalists like Wilfredo Cancio Isla: “Guillermo Alvarez Guedes has died, king of the joke and cubanidad. The man who succeeded in reconciling Cubans everywhere, from the island and the world, through the universal language of laughter.”13

The “naturalness” that commentators have attributed to Alvarez Guedes is due in part to sonic aspects of his performance that I have already mentioned: his accent, tone, and the words he uses. But it is not simply a matter of a one-to-one relationship between sound and ethnic identification. The “naturalness” is a product of how he tells his jokes, the particular style and delivery that make it feel like a Cuban practice. This practice can be best described as falling under the tradition of choteo. Choteo is a form of humor and mockery common among the masses and articulated through the idiomatic specificity of Cuban popular culture. As Cuban cultural critic Jorge Mañach wrote in his 1928 essay, “Indagación del choteo” (Investigation of Choteo), it is “a form of relation typically ours.”14 It is a recognizable, culturally specific form of diversión and interaction that acts as a way to filter serious or distressing experiences in a nonserious, anti-authoritarian, and irreverent manner and thereby also provides an alternative, critically ludic perspective on people, events, and other social and political phenomena that would not otherwise be objects of jest. The “naturalness” of Alvarez Guedes’s choteo, then, becomes a way to help make the “unnatural” state of exile bearable in quotidian life.

Figure 1.2. Guillermo Alvarez Guedes, album cover for Alvarez Guedes 8, 1978.

Alvarez Guedes’s diversión, deployed through his use of choteo and overall performance practice, is not the sole reason for his designation as a “natural” performer, “the typical Cuban exile” that Cristina Saralegui described. Implicitly informing this naturalness is his whiteness. Though his fans primarily experienced his comedy by listening, his likeness was never far behind: it is featured on each of his album covers. Encoded within his “naturalness” is a narrative that manifests itself in jokes that assert whiteness and heteronormativity as part of the communal narrative of exile cubanía. In the section that follows, I examine jokes from the 1970s and 1980s as sites for understanding how the Cuban exile community reconciled attitudes about race and sexuality with US perspectives. Though jokes on race and sexuality in no way represent the majority of the content on his albums, when they do arise these comic bits shine a light on the ongoing project to articulate a cultural identity in exile and its normative boundaries at historical moments when definitions and the privileges of whiteness were being hotly contested. What the popular culture archive highlights is that, contrary to other claims, Miami’s black population was very much on the mind of the Cuban community in these early years.15

Negros y Locas

Cubans arriving in South Florida in the 1960s and 1970s had to navigate all the usual challenges people face in a new country. But in addition to addressing the immediate needs of housing and work, they quickly realized that their social positions in Miami would not be the same as in Cuba. Once at the top of the racial and in many instances the class hierarchy on the island, Cuban exiles were subject to discrimination from the Anglo majority despite the initial warm welcome from federal and local governments.16 Nevertheless, the majority of exiles did not align themselves with other groups facing discrimination in Miami, such as blacks and gays. Instead, they aimed to redeploy their “possessive investment in whiteness” cultivated in Cuba to help define exile cubanía. This narrative of whiteness received support from the media, at least initially. Cheris Brewer Current explains how the US government and media portrayed Cubans to “fit a national ideal of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Americaness.’ Thus, in order to fend off widespread objections, the entrance of Cuban refugees was parsed in Cold War rhetoric that stressed their desirable social, ideological, and racialized class traits.”17 Claims to whiteness, then, were essential components for imagining an exile cubanía drawn from Cuban racial ideologies and reinforced by Cold War rhetoric, which together positioned these exiles as white victims of communism.

While discrimination experienced on the ground complicated this narrative of whiteness and privilege, there was little interest in identifying as an oppressed minority.18 Instead, Cuban exiles drew from a long history of racist and homophobic humor from the island to assist in the crafting of a communal narrative about the place of the exile community in the social hierarchy of South Florida. In the case of Alvarez Guedes, jokes about blacks and locas (gay men) can be found throughout his albums but are most prevalent in material from the tumultuous 1970s and early 1980s—decades marked by racial uprisings and legislation that discriminated against Cubans and Dade County’s gay population. These jokes and performances capture the role diversión played in solidifying and patrolling the boundaries of a white, heteronormative, politically enfranchised exile identity while simultaneously demonstrating the transnational melding of Cuban and US racial and sexual ideologies.

It is not surprising that race-based humor has long existed on an island where histories of slavery, colonialism, and capital have always intersected. What is so fascinating is the way in which the themes and ideological preoccupations encoded within Cuban race-based humor reappear in the popular culture of the post-1959 exile community. In her study of blackface performance in nineteenth-century Cuba, Jill Lane explains the ideological projects of teatro bufo performances: “This blackface humor works discursively at two levels: it controls and limits the otherwise menacing significance of blackness at the same time that it renegotiates the meanings of whiteness in a colonial hierarchy that privileged Spanish peninsulares (literally, ‘peninsulars,’ those born on the Iberian peninsula) over white criollos.”19 Though historical circumstances in colonial Cuba and Miami in the 1970s were of course markedly different, Lane’s description of how blackness operated discursively within the context of bufo is relevant here. Like nineteenth-century bufo, Alvarez Guedes’s race-based material functioned as a means to negotiate Cuban whiteness and its relationship to blackness. I read his jokes as part of an ongoing project for negotiating Cuban whiteness in the context of US racial politics at a time of great anxiety about blackness in Miami and a moment when Cuban racial self-definitions were under fire from Anglos wary of the Cuban influx into South Florida.

The first joke I consider, from Alvarez Guedes 2 released in 1974, speaks to the kind of humor inspired by racial politics in the United States:

A black guy commits a traffic violation in Alabama and they condemn him to die in the arena with the lions. He only ran a red light but they condemned him to die with the lions. They take him to a stadium and they bury him in sand up to his neck. Twenty thousand blond, green-eyed spectators fill the stands. They release the lion and it quickly attacks the black guy who can’t defend himself because his head is the only part of his body above the sand. But when the lion gets close enough, the black guy bites the lion’s leg. The twenty thousand spectators stand up and scream: “PELEA LIMPIO NEGRO HIJO DE PUTA!” (FIGHT FAIR YOU BLACK SON OF A BITCH!)20

In this joke, Alvarez Guedes positions the audience to see the racial drama of the United States from an outsider perspective with Alabama as the symbolic site. And it is not the only joke where he does this. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he sets three more jokes, in addition to his other race-related jokes, in Alabama. As in Cuba, racism against blacks is fodder for humor. In this particular joke, the black man is the silent victim whose last-ditch effort at resistance is read as consistent with stereotypical understandings of uncivilized blackness. The fifteen seconds of uninterrupted laughter following the delivery of the punchline signal the audience’s enjoyment and alignment with a comic perspective that routinely uses racist violence as a means to entertain.

Jokes about blacks in the United States would be familiar to a Cuban audience well-versed in race-based humor from the island. But there is more to these jokes. When I began to listen Alvarez Guedes’s race-based humor on its own, I could not shake the sense that they sounded familiar, American even. I began to search the “dirty jokes books” that became so popular in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. And then I found it. A version of the Alabama joke above can be found in Larry Wilde’s 1975 The Official White Folks/Black Folks Joke Book.21 I have also found two other jokes from Alvarez Guedes’s albums that correspond with material in Blanche Knott’s best-selling Truly Tasteless Jokes series.22 In every case, Alvarez Guedes performed the joke before the publication date in the above-mentioned books. But these joke books include little original material. Instead, authors compiled jokes that they had heard independently or, as in the case of Blanche Knott, that were sent to her after she put out an open call for material in Truly Tasteless Jokes Two.23 My sense is that it is quite unlikely that Alvarez Guedes was sending his original jokes for consideration in these books. Completely fluent in English, the comedian was likely adapting jokes he had heard or read for his routine—a practice he would freely admit to.24

These joke books were equal opportunity offenders. Larry Wilde, who has penned dozens of these joke books, has dedicated collections to specific races and ethnicities.25 The formula in the Truly Tasteless series was to include jokes on a host of different groups in each installment including: Black, Jewish, Polish, WASP, Handicapped, Homosexual, Dead Baby, and for those who like a mix of ethnicities in their jokes, a section called “Ethnic Jokes, Variegated,” among others. Tellingly, Alvarez Guedes never included a Polish or Italian joke on his albums.26 Such jokes would have been foreign in the context of Cuban Miami. Jokes about blacks would be familiar from Cuba and thus enjoyable for his audience in a way jokes about other ethnicities would not have been. Through humor, Alvarez Guedes and his audience could align themselves with the white racial gaze of the United States through a detour into the race-based humor of American popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s.

Is it possible to read the Alabama joke more generously? To give it the benefit of the doubt as an indictment of the violence inflicted upon black bodies in the United States? While it is important to leave that possibility open, historical context makes such a reading less convincing. Alvarez Guedes invites white Cubans to laugh at the racial politics of the United States at a moment when anxiety about blacks in Miami was high. Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn detail what they call thirteen separate racially charged “miniriots” in 1970s Dade County—violence that reached a climax with the uprising of 1980, sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating death of a black man named Arthur McDuffie.27 These uprisings were rooted in the long history of discrimination, unequal power relations, and segregation in Miami and would have been visible to the growing Cuban community. The vast majority of Cubans in Miami at the time this joke was performed in 1975 identified as white and had little interest in casting their lot with the black communities of South Florida and the challenges they faced. Blacks in Miami quickly found cause for resenting the Cuban community. They watched as white Cubans began competing with them in the labor market. The generous benefits and programs instituted to assist Cubans fleeing communism added to this ill will.28 While the black community took up the Cuban question frequently, Guillermo Grenier and Max Castro show that the Spanish-language press did not reciprocate this attention. Instead, negative attitudes toward blacks in Miami manifested themselves in more specialized and ephemeral media channels like radio, tabloid newspapers, and of course, jokes.29

In one such example on Alvarez Guedes 16 (1984), the comedian makes a joke about blacks in Miami in the context of growing bilingualism in the city:

Bilingualism is becoming so entrenched in Miami that even delinquents are practicing it. The negritos that go out to mug people, los negritos, los negritos americanos, have figured out that Cuban women hide their rings and money in their bras. And now when they mug them and take their purses they say ¡TETA! ¡TETA! (TIT! TIT!)30

Negrito, the diminutive of “negro,” literally translates to “little black.” In Cuba, it can be used as a term of endearment within and across racial lines, but as Lane observes, it is impossible to separate this use from the way it has been used condescendingly toward black Cuban men.31 In this particular joke, there is little affection in the use of the term. Instead, “negrito” functions as a means to soften the very real and direct target of blacks not in faraway Alabama, but in Miami. Black uprisings in response to decades of institutional racism in Miami in the 1970s and 1980s would have certainly informed the telling and reception of this joke. Given the heightened discussion around black criminality due to the uprisings, the use of the diminutive “negrito” is an attempt to bring some playfulness to the tense topic of black crime in the early 1980s while simultaneously reinforcing commonly held attitudes about blackness.

I am also struck by Alvarez Guedes’s need to clarify that he is talking about “negritos americanos.” On the recording, it sounds as if he catches himself in some kind of error, reflected in a momentary stutter and in his repetition of “los negritos americanos.” Only four years had passed since Mariel and consistent with his larger practice of avoiding topics that have divided the Cuban community, he may have wanted to make sure that his audience knew that he was not referring to Afro-Cuban marielitos in Miami who faced discrimination from Anglos and white Cuban exiles. On the other hand, these “negritos americanos” are fair game and are quickly aligned with audience expectations about blacks being violent and out to victimize white Cuban women. In this joke, racist attitudes toward blacks in Miami at a moment of profound racial tension mix with the long history of equating criminality with blackness in Cuba.32 This joke in particular functions as a way to address that racial tension while simultaneously asserting whiteness by situating Cubans as victims of aggressive, unruly blacks.

Alvarez Guedes’s jokes about race relations in Miami dramatize a clear understanding of the racial hierarchy at work in the city and the nation more broadly, as well as where Cubans should belong in it—above blacks. As the years pass, this is what precisely what happens. Cubans in Miami make large gains in political and economic power, often to the detriment of the black community.33 Cubans eagerly claimed whiteness and its privileges as the organizing racial logic of exile. To do this, they forged a narrative about blackness through the perspective of US and Cuban racial ideologies while simultaneously cultivating whiteness as an essential component of exile cubanía. Adding to the pleasure of these jokes is a kind of comfort in knowing that although Cuba and the United States are very different, some things are consistent. Blacks are targets for humor in Cuba in a manner that aligns with racist humor conventions in the United States, as the joke set in Alabama suggests.

There are important differences between Alvarez Guedes’s treatment of blacks who are explicitly defined as Cuban in his jokes and “los negritos Americanos.” Black Cubans are often represented in the way they would have been in bufo routines: as wise-cracking, playfully sneaky, and articulating a desire to be white. But one joke in particular captures an important pattern that will play out as this book moves through the decades and I shift my focus to more recent migratory waves. The pattern lies in how groups that would normally be discriminated against or looked down on by white Cuban exiles (blacks, gays, more recent arrivals from the island) become protagonists in political rhetoric and popular culture forms when they can be used symbolically to criticize the Castro government.

A joke on Alvarez Guedes 22 titled “Vendiendo negros” (Selling Blacks) captures this practice. It starts with a prologue of sorts: “When the Revolution arrived, as you all know, they said it was to benefit blacks and yet they have been the most harmed. For example, young blacks are sent to Angola to fight and they are killed. So the truth is that blacks have been the most harmed in Cuba.”34 Alvarez Guedes goes on to explain that blacks leaving Cuba pose a real threat to the Castro government’s rhetoric of racial equality on the island. If they leave, he reasons, it must be seen as a condemnation by the very group the government claims to have helped the most. After these prefatory remarks, we get to the joke, which features a black Cuban man and his family at the airport waiting to leave the island for the United States. There, the black man faces constant harassment from a Cuban government official who is trying to dissuade him from leaving by criticizing US imperialism and the country’s treatment of blacks. In a final attempt to convince him to stay, the government official says, “ ‘Blacks in the United States aren’t worth a thing!’ To which the black man responds, ‘¿Quién te ha dicho a ti que yo voy a vender negros allí?’ ” (Who told you I was going there to sell blacks?)35

Racism against Afro-Cubans within the Cuban exile community is rarely, if ever, explicitly addressed in popular culture. But if racism can be used as a tool to detract from the narrative of racial equality under the Revolution and its policies more broadly, then it is fair game. To be sure, the Cuban Revolution has failed to address a multitude of issues involving racial discrimination as multiple scholars have pointed out.36 But to suggest that Afro-Cubans have endured the most harm under the Revolution is consistent with the general refusal within the exile community to acknowledge any accomplishments under Castro. White Cuban exiles who arrived before Mariel were quick to use the boatlift as proof of the failures of the Revolution. But the symbolic “victory” of Cubans fleeing the island during Mariel did not lead to better treatment of marielitos, especially black arrivals, once they settled in Miami. This population routinely suffered discrimination on the basis of race, sexuality, and a perceived lack of anti-revolutionary fervor.37

What this joke does is “sanitize” blackness for symbolic use in order to criticize the Cuban government. Small details matter. For instance, the black man in the joke is leaving the island with his family. He has not taken to the sea as other Cubans of color did during the chaotic boatlift. Instead, he waits for his flight to Miami at the airport—an orderly departure. Like the narrative of his white countrymen before him, this black Cuban male is leaving the island with a family unit because of government persecution, complete with a plane ride. Besides the anxiety about blackness, exiles found the number of single young men arriving during the boatlift troubling—a reversal of the narrative of family-driven migration and the sense of responsibility and wholesomeness that goes with it. In addition, the black man’s snappy comeback to the Cuban official’s warnings about racism in the United States seems to reinforce the conservative position that claims of racism are exaggerated and an excuse for those unwilling to work hard.38 The protagonist of this joke is simply a white Cuban exile of a different color whose race provides an avenue for attacking the Revolution in a way that is consistent with broader anti-Castro rhetoric.

The pattern of politically expedient critique also arises in how the exile community seized upon the Cuban government’s treatment of gays. Néstor Almendros’s 1984 documentary, Improper Conduct, captures the experiences of homosexual men sent to labor camps called Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAPs) (Military Units to Aid Production). Public figures in the exile community celebrated the film for its exposure of the repressiveness of the Castro government and as an opportunity to “shake up the conscience” of liberal supporters of the Revolution in Europe and the United States.39 Homophobia has a long history in Cuba before and after the Revolution. As Emilio Bejel points out in his study of homosexuality and nationalism: “Homophobic discourses articulated as part of modern national precepts have been publicly expounded by Cuban nationalist leaders from the earliest days of modern Cuban history. Their discussions have often defined the homosexual body, implicitly or explicitly, as a threat to the health of the body of the nation.”40 Of course, the powerfully ingrained homophobia in Cuba did not disappear when Cubans moved from the island to Miami. Although Improper Conduct was celebrated, attitudes toward homosexuality in the exile community were less than hospitable. Ricardo Ortíz and Susana Peña have shown that homophobia in Cuba in the 1970s and 1980s was mirrored in the exile context.41 Like jokes about race, jokes about sexuality combined common social attitudes from Cuba and United States to consolidate a narrative of white, heteronormative exile cubanía and the social privileges encoded therein.

On Alvarez Guedes’s albums, the topic of sexuality comes up in the figure of la loca, literally “crazy woman.” Susana Peña describes locas as “flamboyant, gender-transgressive male homosexuals.”42 Locas serve as a popular, recurring topic throughout Alvarez Guedes’s repertoire.43 In his material from the 1970s and 1980s, they frequently appear in jokes meant to prompt audience laughter through an audible performance of effeminacy and cartoonish representations of sexually aggressive locas with their insatiable and uncontrollable desire for men. The following from Alvarez Guedes 3 captures the essence of his loca material:

The police arrive to raid una fiesta de locas and they surround their house with police cars and a patrol wagon. When they have the house completely surrounded, una loca comes out of the house like a shot running [makes cartoonish running sound] and bam! gets into the wagon. The cop asks, “Why did you come out alone and get into the wagon by yourself?” To which la loca replies [effeminate voice], “Porque el año pasado me tocó ir de pie” (Because last year I had to go [to the police station] by foot!)44

The setting of the joke betrays its historical context. With police roundups of gay men in Miami in the news, Alvarez Guedes signals a situation that would be familiar to his audience. The comedian even uses the word “raid” in English suggesting that this term would be understood by his predominantly Spanish-speaking audience. With state-sponsored violence not being funny in and of itself, the comic pleasure hinges on the cartoonish depiction of la loca. Alvarez Guedes produces this caricature by manipulating his voice to resemble the sound effect of a cartoon character running quickly (think Bugs Bunny) complete with the “bam!” when la loca gets into the police wagon. The next comic layer comes when the joke moves to unsettle the expectations of the audience: Why would the “guilty” loca willingly get into the police wagon? Alvarez Guedes supplies the answer by adopting an effeminate voice and lilt that his audience would immediately recognize. The punchline builds off of the cartoonish representation up to that point. This is not la loca’s first run-in with the law. La loca simply can’t help being loca. Flamboyance (conveyed in Alvarez Guedes’s loca ventriloquism) and the repetition of the “illegal” behavior of attending a party with other locas suggest that the desire for pleasure and the company of men trumps the unpleasure of yet another visit to jail. This loca does not resist state violence; it is the accepted cost of effeminate, same-sex desire. In this narrative, la loca is asking for it.

If this joke were made by a Cuban drag queen or queer performance artist, it might be possible to read it as resistance to the criminalization of queer sexualities in the United States.45 But alas, this is not the performer or the audience. Instead, this joke and others are in keeping with how queerness has traditionally entered and been consumed in popular culture on and off the island—as a kind of abstract entertainment, pure surface, and a convenient source for a quick laugh.46 This kind of humor is so ingrained that it is possible to discern laughter from the audience on the album even before the punchline is delivered. The mere mention of “una fiesta de locas” was enough for some members of the audience. This abject image of la loca, legible only through sexuality deemed aberrant and thus comical in its incongruousness, was and continues to be a regular feature of Cuban humor on and off the stage. It is a critical thread that I will examine throughout the book.

Problems arise when la loca ceases to exist only for entertainment and becomes “real,” a political subject who demands rights and fair treatment and actively campaigns against state-sponsored violence. As with jokes about race, jokes about sexuality can be read in the context of the Cuban community forging a normative narrative of exile cubanía. In January of 1977 a group of gay activists organized under the banner of the Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays to lobby for a change in the county’s human rights statute that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual preference. Though the amendment passed, it quickly drew the ire of conservative groups in South Florida. Anita Bryant became the face of the backlash leading an organization called Save Our Children, Inc., created to rally support for the effort to repeal the anti-discrimination amendment.47 In a shrewd political move, Bryant and Save Our Children made an aggressive push to enlist the support of South Florida’s growing Cuban community. All accounts point to Cubans as strong supporters of Bryant’s efforts.48 In June of 1977, the anti-discrimination amendment was repealed in a landslide referendum.

There is little doubt that the rhetoric of Save Our Children, communicated in the organization’s very title, would strike a chord in the exile community. Many were concerned in the 1960s and 1970s about the Americanization of their children and their exposure to counterculture movements dedicated to questioning the racial, gender, and sexual dynamics of US society.49 By invoking “the children,” Bryant and her organization hit a nerve. The mobilization of the Cuban vote against this issue would serve as an example of what was possible when the community voted as a bloc—a prelude perhaps to the Cuban political dominance of South Florida that would begin to develop in earnest in the 1980s.50 Only seven years after Cubans in Miami rallied behind the Bryant initiative to repeal the anti-discrimination act, they stood up and applauded Improper Conduct for its condemnation of the Cuban government’s treatment of sexual minorities.

There are perhaps less obvious reasons for this preoccupation with sexuality and masculinity. The hypermasculine posturing of the exile community and its resistance to a gay rights agenda can be read partially as a response to a certain crisis of masculinity stirred by the profound impotence felt as a consequence of the consistent failure to effect political change in Cuba. The terrible rout of CIA-trained Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs Invasion is the most visible example of this impotence. But in truth, Fidel Castro’s vitality and carefully curated masculine image—his green fatigues signaling readiness for battle—served as a constant reminder in those early years to the exile community of who “the real man” was. The need to constantly assert a strong, masculine presence was thus extremely important to the exile community, as was displacement of that failed masculinity. Satirical Cuban exile tabloid periodicals often represented Fidel Castro as a woman in the service of amorous Russians.51 Raúl Castro, followed by rumors of closeted homosexuality since the early years of the Revolution, is consistently represented as una loca in political cartooning even today. It is telling that the government official most often imagined as una loca is the official with the most symbolically “masculine” post as head of the Cuban Armed Forces. Choteo becomes a way to displace failed masculinity onto the communists while consolidating its antithesis in exile—a white, potent masculinity emphasized in popular culture and politics.

Like his jokes about race, Alvarez Guedes’s material about sexuality is a meaningful site to pause and consider the ways in which Cubans combined and reconciled social codes and attitudes on the island with those of the United States. Choteo’s long history as a popular and quotidian strategy for narrating Cuban national identity and its racial and sexual preoccupations surfaces in the exile context to do similar work. But as I explain in the next section, the articulation of exile cubanía with a claim on the privileges of normative whiteness in the United States did meet resistance from Anglo Miami.

Cubano-Americano Tensions

Alvarez Guedes’s comedy was not just a means to claim an abstract, privileged whiteness. Instead, exiles were invested in a distinctly Cuban whiteness that also resisted Anglo assimilationist paradigms. Built into the rhetoric of exile is the notion of forced departure and the fantasy of return. These two elements of the exile narrative strongly informed the desire to maintain Cuban cultural characteristics and the performances of cultural nationalism that permeate Alvarez Guedes’s comedy. Unsurprisingly, this led to tensions between exiles and the Anglo majority throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Miami. It is out of these tensions that one of Alvarez Guedes’s most popular and recurring targets for the anti-authoritarianism of choteo surfaces, “los americanos.”

Exiles arriving in the first two waves of migration during 1959–1974 enjoyed a warm welcome from the US government. Aside from hoping that the physical movement of so many Cubans would destabilize Castro’s new government, the United States held up the example of the exodus as proof of the evils and failures of communism. This helped to supplement the aggressive, anti-communist propaganda effort in the Americas during the Cold War. To drive the point home, Cuban success in the United States would prove that the American capitalist system was superior to communism. For these and other politically expedient reasons, Cubans were granted refugee status and received a number of benefits in the form of federal assistance.52

On the local level, Cubans received a great deal of support from the city of Miami. This is especially true in regard to language policy. Max Castro identifies the three most significant policies regarding language laws as the implementation of “bilingual education in the Dade county public schools in 1963, the declaration of Metropolitan Dade County as officially bilingual and bicultural in 1973 and the creation of El Herald in 1976.”53 The fact that these laws existed is quite extraordinary, and they helped facilitate, to some degree, the transition from Cuba to the United States. At the very least, the policies adopted in Miami were symbolic of a certain degree of cultural tolerance.

But the welcome from the federal and local government did not always coincide with life on the ground. María Cristina García explains that locals resented Cubans both for the financial assistance they received from the government (often more than citizens) and for their “boisterous” behavior.54 Adding to this resentment was the creation and sustainment of a Cuban ethnic enclave,55 which reduced the pressure to assimilate. As the size and economic power of the community grew, so did resistance and opposition to what many non-Cubans in Miami referred to as the Cuban “takeover” of the city.

The frustrations of “native” Miamians reached a boiling point in 1980 with the circumstances surrounding the Mariel crisis. The Miami Herald railed against President Carter’s weak, undefined policy regarding Mariel and the exile community’s desire to facilitate the exodus and the subsequent resettlement of refugees in Miami. Editors at the paper used Castro’s characterization of the marielitos as social misfits to justify their aggressive stance toward the new arrivals and the exile community more broadly. Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick define the perceived threat to the establishment this way: “first as an economic cataclysm, given the depressed state of local industry and the negative impact of the inflow on Miami’s status as a tourist destination; and second, as a direct threat to the establishment power structure, given the addition of many thousands to an already uncomfortably large Cuban population.”56 In the time leading up to and after the boatlift, the Miami Herald actively played up these threats and effectively agitated the non-Cuban population in Miami.

With the white establishment bent on asserting power in a time of rapid change, the modern English-Only movement was born in Miami with an anti-bilingual referendum. It passed, and in November 1980, the ordinance changed the policies of biculturalism and bilingualism in Dade County instituted in the early 1970s.57 Much as it did in the repeal of the 1977 amendment prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexuality, Miami had taken one step forward and two steps back. But these direct attempts by the Miami Herald and local government to limit the power of the Cuban community did not achieve the desired effect: “Instead of subduing the Cubans, the hegemonic discourse of the Herald and its allies transformed the exile community into a self-conscious ethnic group that organized effectively for local political competition.”58 By the mid-1980s, Cuban-born politicians held important government posts on the local and state levels. In 1981, the influential Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was founded with Jorge Mas Canosa at the helm.

With all these events roiling Miami, Alvarez Guedes performed regularly, cementing his reputation as un tipo típico. Much of his comedic production during this time addressed the hot-button language issue and the general culture clash well underway in Miami. As the inflammatory rhetoric and tension between Anglos and the exile community escalated, so did the tone and aggression of Alvarez Guedes’s material. Choteo’s anti-hierarchical strain became a means to confront Anglo political power while simultaneously attempting to consolidate an exile cubanía founded on national characteristics, anti-Castro sentiment, cultural expressions, and, as discussed previously, whiteness and heteronormativity. Directing some aggression outward toward los americanos created a welcome respite from the infighting, while the tried and true strategy of identifying an outside threat served to buttress a communal narrative of the exile community as being free from internal conflict.

Clases de Idioma Cubano

Language has always been Alvarez Guedes’s favorite topic. One of his most popular running gags, titled “Clases de idioma cubano” (Cuban Language Classes), began in 1974, when Miami was still officially a bilingual city. The albums that include these Cuban language classes always feature them as the last track. The reason is clear: they absolutely bring the house down. He prefaces his first “class” on Alvarez Guedes 2 with the following justification as to why they are necessary in the first place:

You all know that Miami has been officially declared a bilingual city. The Americans have declared it officially but I think this bilingualism exists only on our part, the part of the Cubans because those Cubans who are here can get by (se defienden) in English. But on the part of the Americans, the same thing doesn’t apply because among the poor Americans, it is extremely difficult to find one that speaks two words of Spanish. Because of this, I’d like to dedicate this part of the album to the Americans, to give them a class on Cuban language.… These classes will help us understand each other better.59

The key phrase in this excerpt is “se defienden” translated idiomatically as “get by.” In this context, the invocation of the verb defender is a common way to refer to one’s tenuous grip on a foreign language. I retain the Spanish phrase in my translation in order to explore the resonance of the word in relation to Alvarez Guedes’s treatment of cultural and political exchanges between los americanos and the exile community in all his Miami-related material. In this “class” and the jokes regarding language that I take up below, an economy of defense (“defender”) is always working as subtext. The use of choteo to narrate the politics of language in Miami amounts to a form of defense for a Cuban community that feels a certain degree of vulnerability as a result of exilic displacement and the challenges posed by a sociopolitical landscape scripted in English. As the political tension in Miami mounts, the signification of defender in Alvarez Guedes’s performances will shift to meet the escalation of anti-Cuban rhetoric.

Alvarez Guedes’s introduction to his Cuban language class sets up one of the defining features of choteo’s political potential as expressed by Mañach. In his essay on choteo, he describes the playful point of view on the intractable realities of life as choteo’s tendencia niveladora (leveling tendency)—the ability to create a narrative of experience that “levels,” or balances, the uneven power dynamics of the social milieu through the language of choteo. Choteo subverts the dominant model of immigrant assimilation in the United States by suggesting that Cubans are in a position to pity those “poor Americans” who cannot speak Spanish. Instead of interpreting the decision to make the city of Miami officially bilingual as a benefit to Cubans, Alvarez Guedes understands it as an almost matter-of-fact, logical unfolding of events. Cubans “se defienden” in English but now the Americans must fulfill the literal meaning of what it means to live in a bilingual city where everyone speaks two languages. In the narrative of the Cuban language class, the burden of cultural assimilation and understanding, usually carried by the incoming population, is transferred to the established community through choteo’s leveling tendency.

Once he has finished his introduction, Alvarez Guedes begins his class by asking his audience to forgive him for speaking in English so the Americans can understand him. Of course, his audience is composed of Cubans who feel most comfortable speaking in Spanish. But imagining an audience of americanos allows for a comic reversal of the classic teacher-student dynamic at work in the encounter between “native” and immigrant. Under this logic, the newly arrived must learn the language and customs of the United States with a certain amount of deference to those who were born citizens. By putting himself in a position to teach los americanos of Miami, Alvarez Guedes reverses the logic of this dynamic and places power into the hands of the Cubans. His English is accented but syntactically flawless as he explains two “Cuban” words that he will teach, mierda y comemierda (shit and shit eater, idiomatically, asshole). He then goes on to explain how phrases in English like “go to hell” can be translated into Cuban as “vaya a la mierda.” “Teaching” Cuban phrases that have a distinctly popular, vulgar resonance to los americanos and equating them with English phrases makes the language of political power legible to those Cubans who may feel intimidated by the privileged position of English in Miami at the time. Alvarez Guedes’s use of the familiar language of choteo creates the opportunity for a pleasurable encounter with the unfamiliar dominant language.

The notion of familiarity warrants further discussion in relation to how choteo brings about pleasure for the audience. Besides already being familiar to many exiles who followed his career in Cuba, Alvarez Guedes’s jokes and stories create a safe space where anxieties generated by the experience of exile can be managed pleasurably. The choteo that describes the relationship between Cubans and americanos is an explicit reminder of those common denominators of cubanía that Alvarez Guedes constantly tapped: we are different, special, and one way to articulate that is through diversión as a recognizable form of relation. Every time the audience laughs, applauds, or silently awaits the next joke, they ally themselves with Alvarez Guedes’s perspective—a view that values, champions, and furthers the cause of the exile community. Alvarez Guedes’s comic persona assumes the mantle of “defender.” The humorous, playful language functions not only as mode for reimagining the difficulties associated with exile but also as a means to create an active, critical, political consciousness united around a cultural identity threatened by American assimilationist paradigms.

As the years went by, Alvarez Guedes continued to release albums annually and remained committed to addressing the relationship between los americanos and Miami’s Cuban community. What changed was the boldness of the humor as the political climate in Miami became more hostile toward exiles. What started as a Cuban language class for “poor Americans” who can’t speak Spanish evolved into a defiant, almost brash assertion of cultural difference. Take “Viva la diferencia” (Long Live Difference) featured on Alvarez Guedes 10 (1979). Alvarez Guedes opens this story by saying, “Los cubanos se han cagado en el melting pot” (Cubans have shit on the concept of the melting pot), and follows with a list of examples detailing how Cubans have resisted the call to assimilate through the maintenance of distinct cultural characteristics.

“Shitting” on the most recognizable metaphor for American assimilation constitutes a defiant assertion of cultural legitimacy and resilience. The constant use of abject imagery in much of Alvarez Guedes’s comedic performance is consistent with literary critic Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s theorization of choteo’s scatological mode. According to Pérez Firmat, the abject language of choteo is consistent with its peripheral relation to centrist discourse. As such, choteo is “a movement toward or assault from the margins.”60 With Cubans on the margins of Miami political power in the 1970s and early 1980s, Alvarez Guedes’s comedy represents a desire to reimagine the power relations within the exilic space and to bring the margins to the center. At the same time, the jokes about negros and locas represent how in that move to the center, blackness and homosexuality were rendered abject and placed on the margins.

Choteo’s assault from the margins becomes more pronounced on Alvarez Guedes 11, recorded in the chaotic year of 1980. The tension of the anti-bilingual referendum combined with the fallout from the Mariel crisis spilled over into the material on this album. Unlike the more covert aggression of “teaching” words like “mierda” and “comemierda” to an imagined American audience on Alvarez Guedes 2, the material on this album addresses the contentiousness in Miami much more directly. In “De ayer a hoy” (“Yesterday to Today”) Alvarez Guedes discusses how Miami has changed since Cubans first arrived. He focuses again on language, explaining how speaking Spanish in Miami used to be equivalent to saying a vulgar word and citing instances when Americans would insult Cubans for not speaking English. The theme of reversal, putting the Cubans into the position of power via the humorous narrative, continues but in a much more aggressive way. He suggests that the Americans are now “trained” and are accepting of Spanish. Within this narrative, Spanish has replaced English as the dominant language. This dominance is communicated most effectively when Alvarez Guedes focuses on the reach of the Cuban community into the realm of business. To illustrate his point, Alvarez Guedes describes how he went into a pharmacy to ask for change for a dollar in order to make a phone call. He asked in English, to which the clerk responded in Spanish, “Now you want too much my brother. Now you want people to speak English here and everything.”61 The prevalence of Spanish within the economic sphere symbolizes the growing strength of the Cuban community. Cuban-owned businesses and other entrepreneurial ventures had been climbing steadily, and this humorous example not only serves as a rebuff to demands to speak English but also demonstrates the successful evolution of the Cuban enclave system in Miami standing in direct conflict with American demands for assimilation.

After giving a variety of examples as to why Americans have to learn Spanish to do business in Miami, Alvarez Guedes reaches a conclusion:

With the Cubans coming from Mariel, with those coming from the North fleeing the cold, and the Central and South Americans that are constantly arriving here, this [Miami] is going to be ours! The few Americans left are going to have to go to hell. We are going to open a relocalization center to send them to whatever city that speaks English.62

Amidst raucous laughter, he then goes on to explain that while Spanish is on top, it must be instituted in everything. He makes fun of those people and business names that mix English and Spanish together and then closes with his utopic vision of Miami:

I always say that Miami will not be perfect until the day that a Cuban police officer arrests an American for a transit violation. The Cuban police officer takes the American to a Cuban judge and when the judge says, “Guilty or innocent?” and the American tells the judge [in badly inflected Spanish], “Yo no hablar español” the judge says [angrily], “Oh, you don’t speak Spanish? Well, to school you go, damn it! Six months until you learn!”63

The “perfect” Miami that Alvarez Guedes envisions is met with laughter and applause from the audience because of the irreverent attitude and subversive rhetoric directed toward those in power—both hallmarks of choteo.64 But the approval that the audience’s reaction signifies stands in direct opposition to the anxiousness felt by Cubans and non-Cubans alike throughout 1980. Even in the context of Mariel, when Alvarez Guedes recorded this joke, his desire is to unite by including the marielitos in the narrative of the exile community despite the negative press surrounding them. Discussing the relationship between americanos and Cubans during this period through choteo is a way to filter this social anxiety and consolidate the exile community while simultaneously lodging a critique against the language politics in Miami in the early 1980s through choteo’s leveling tendency.

At the same time, Alvarez Guedes and his audience are coming to grips with the reality of exile and the gradual loss of faith in the narrative of return. The inability to participate or contribute to the sociopolitical reality of life in Cuba necessitates a certain shift of psychic, social, and economic resources. Miami must become home; what could not be done in Cuba will be attempted here. Imagining South Florida through the narrative form of choteo is just one step toward making Miami “home.” With the subversive, humorous perspective that choteo affords, the struggles that arise out of dealing with a now hostile establishment in Miami can be confronted through a ludic lens that produces pleasure, if only temporarily, within the context of Alvarez Guedes’s performance.65

In 1982, Alvarez Guedes released his best-selling and certainly most unique album titled Alvarez Guedes 14: How to Defend Yourself from the Cubans. What makes this album so exceptional is that it is the only one he released that features him performing primarily in English. The album is a mixture of an expansion on his Cuban language classes and some old material from previous albums translated into English.

With Spanish becoming nearly ubiquitous in Miami, Alvarez Guedes suggests that non-Spanish speakers must be able to “defend” themselves by learning some key phrases. The meaning of the phrase “se defienden,” used earlier to articulate how Cubans in Miami described their tenuous grip on the English language, completely changes in the context of this performance. The repeal of Miami’s status as a bilingual city moves Alvarez Guedes to reconsider his earlier, playful utopian idea of a city where everyone speaks English and Spanish. On this album, non-Spanish speakers are identified as those who need to “get by” and “defend” themselves by learning Spanish. If they do not, they risk being unable to navigate a Miami that has undergone radical change with the influx of immigrants from Latin America, most specifically Cubans. The text quoted below is from the very beginning of the album when Alvarez Guedes first greets his audience:

I’ve been watching very closely what’s been happening in Miami lately and I believe that something has to be done in favor of those who can’t speak Spanish in this area. They have to learn to defend themselves. They have to learn Spanish because they need the goddamn language. They need it. It is the only language you hear everywhere. I don’t care where you are. Wherever you are, in Miami, there are Cubans.… Sometimes we take advantage because since we know that you don’t speak Spanish, we talk of you [sic] in front of you and you don’t know it.66

He follows this up by imagining situations in which an americano would have to defend him or herself from Cubans. Every example describes the americano as being on the outside looking in and incapable of understanding when Cubans are talking badly about him or her. Choteo has changed the stakes of the game through a clear inversion of power relations. Cuban culture on this album becomes center while the non-Spanish speaking americanos are marginalized by their inability to understand what has been classified as “foreign” for so long.

This positing of Cuban culture as moving from minor to major indicates a shift in how “defense” has evolved in Alvarez Guedes’s repertoire. In the first Cuban language class, “defender” was invoked to describe one’s ability to at least “get by” in English. The covert aggression of this first class used choteo to “level” the linguistic power relations in Miami by creating an imagined scenario wherein Spanish was an important, equal part of the “bi” in “bilingual” city. As the political situation in Miami became more intense with the Mariel crisis and the anti-bilingual referendum, “defense” took on a more military connotation—defense as offense. These narratives stress how the Cuban and Latin American presence is a powerful force politically and economically by pointing out the pervasiveness of Spanish throughout the city. Alvarez Guedes goes on the attack on these albums, using choteo to speak out against the Anglo establishment, the example of Mañach’s “inflexible authority” attempting to discredit the community. On How to Defend Yourself from the Cubans, the Cuban community, and by extension, Spanish, is positioned as dominant. In these narratives, the burden of defense is now upon los americanos in a Miami where Cuban culture has become the center and English is becoming more and more marginal.

Adding to the comic effect of this album is Alvarez Guedes’s articulation of Spanish. When he uses Spanish, it is only to “teach” his “American audience” how to use certain vulgar words to defend themselves from Cubans in the situations mentioned above. But when he does explain how to fire back against these Cubans, his Spanish is inflected with an English accent. He mispronounces words, puts the accent on the wrong syllable, and generally sounds like the stereotypical gringo attempting to roll a pair of “Rs” with little success. In contrast to the gringo-inflected Spanish, Alvarez Guedes’s speech reflects a relative mastery of English. To perform in English to an audience that understands the jokes as they shift from English to Spanish is to enact the community’s attempt at mastering the codes of the dominant culture while simultaneously retaining culturally specific forms like the Spanish language and choteo as powerful, pleasurable ways of narrating experience.

Although the performance is all about displacing the need for defense onto los americanos of Miami, teaching an “American audience” how to defend themselves against the linguistic threat of Cuban Spanish is, once again, a form of defense for a community at a particularly hostile moment in time. National poll results after the Mariel crisis showed the country’s extremely low opinion of the Cuban community in the United States.67 The repeal of bilingualism laws, together with the negative views of the Cuban community, created a need to perform a certain brand of cultural solidarity and even superiority. How to Defend Yourself from the Cubans is one example. It performs cultural nationalism in English with a heightened sensitivity to the play between American and Cuban culture. The performance on this album demonstrates that despite learning English and assimilating in some respects, exile culture is still dominated by cubanía. By performing his mastery of English and simultaneously invoking the familiar language and codes of choteo, Alvarez Guedes makes a defiant statement against American assimilation models and stresses the vitality of the exile community.

Alvarez Guedes’s choteo and unmistakable popularity provide a means for understanding the ways in which the exile community narrated itself for itself during the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. In a time of domestic terrorism in the form of bombings and threats, generational shifts, political infighting within the community, and the most intense anti-Castro sentiment, diversión played an instrumental role in establishing the “common ground” of exile cubanía. Alvarez Guedes’s material in the 1970s and 1980s reveals the utility of popular culture for “analyzing the consciousness of the past.”68 His performances and his widespread appeal reveal how the community made sense of its place in Miami’s social hierarchy through a ludic discourse that combined the racial and normative sexual ideologies of Cuba and the United States to inform a narrative of exile cubanía. The history of choteo and its racial and sexual preoccupations on the island aligned with social hierarchies and discriminatory rhetoric in the United States and provided a convenient transnational continuity for exiles getting their bearings. When Anglos in Miami attempted to enclose the exile community in the realm of “otherness” and its attendant disenfranchisement, the community answered with a brash assertion of a Cuban cultural identity that simultaneously insisted on the privileges inherent in whiteness and heteronormativity. This manifested itself in popular culture and as the 1980s progressed, increased visibility and power in local and then national governments. Alvarez Guedes’s vision for the “perfect” Miami where Cubans dominated was not far off.

* * *

One of my favorite possessions is a 1983 talking Alvarez Guedes doll. He hangs out in my office, and students and colleagues alike get a kick out of pressing his stomach and hearing him belt out foul-mouthed phrases like “¡Ño! ¡Desde que llegaste lo único que haces es hablar mierda!” (Damn! Since you got here all you do is talk shit/nonsense!). Here, he is surrounded by the many books that have helped me theorize his comedy. But perhaps no study has been more crucial in that regard than José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Through a reading of queer performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, Muñoz explains how choteo has “disidentificatory potential” in the way it can “mediate between a space of identification with and total disavowal of the dominant culture’s normative identificatory nodes.”69 Alvarez Guedes jokes don’t always make me laugh, and much of his material on race and sexuality puts him at odds with my politics. But the way he tells all his jokes, the way he mobilizes choteo through language, tone, timing, and delivery, have always been a source of pleasure and an influence on my own “performance” as a public speaker. As Carmelita Tropicana and Muñoz show us, these things do not have to be at odds. It is possible to disidentify with exile cubanía, “not rejecting it and not embracing it without reservations,” in order to produce alternative visions of cubanía, community, and the world.70 I explore this potential in more detail in the next chapter with the work of two US-born Cuban Americans who mobilize choteo to both identify with their parents’ generation and criticize the political orthodoxy of exile cubanía.