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ОглавлениеIntroduction
Feeling Cuban
By not opening with a joke, I heed a valuable lesson learned from the many comedians I write about in this book. Any good joke, like any introduction worth reading, requires a solid setup. Moments of humor will come—however fraught—as I discuss political and generational shifts within the Cuban diaspora in the United States from the 1970s to the 2010s while at the same time pointing out what ludic popular culture can tell us about community formations, performance, and race. But before I can get to these points, I need to provide you with some of the details, the context, that will make the purpose of this book clearer.
Think of it as my own setup.
I grew up in and around Union City, New Jersey, affectionately referred to as “Havana on the Hudson” because of the large Cuban population that settled there in the years following Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959. My family had all the exile street cred: unfair imprisonments, seizure of property, the high-ranking family member whose loyalty to the Revolution trumped family ties. While these stories framed angry and explicit anti-Castro sentiment, they were largely overshadowed in both frequency and intensity by the ludic in quotidian life. Jokes about bumbling communists. Trips to the bathroom prefaced with “voy a mandar una carta a Fidel” (I’m going to send a letter to Fidel). My grandfather’s guajiro sayings marked by double entendre and filtered through the symbolic economy of the farm he worked—plenty of gallos and yeguas. From an early age, this is what it meant to be Cuban in my mind. Not the rumba or roast pork but la jodedera, “perhaps our only national sport” as Enrico Mario Santí has suggested—the joking, wordplay, and comic barbs aimed at anyone who needed to get knocked down a peg.1
In making my way through the bibliography on Cuban America, I found the affective emphasis inverted. Most scholarship on Cuban America equated exile with melancholy, anger, and bitterness.2 Where was the focus on the kind of quotidian pleasures that are the reward for a long workweek—the bawdy satirical comedy playing at a local theater in Little Havana, the latest joke about Fidel a friend shares over a cafecito? To be sure, life in the exile community wasn’t one big conga line down Calle Ocho or Bergenline Avenue. But popular culture was always there to inspire not only the laughter that keeps you from crying but also a ludic sociability that helped shape narratives of a community. Searching for a way to make sense of what felt like a profound disconnect between scholarly focus and lived experience, I started listening to jokes, lots and lots of jokes, in an attempt to laugh my way to greater clarity.
After hours of listening to the comedy of Guillermo Alvarez Guedes—one of the most beloved figures in the history of Cuban popular culture—I came upon a moment from his eleventh standup album recorded live in 1980 that would become the point of departure for this book. Innocently enough, Alvarez Guedes begins the second half of this album with some observational humor about people’s obsession with putting on weight. But before he can provide his insight into corpulency, a man in the audience interrupts the crowd’s attentive silence by directly addressing the comedian: “¿Y no va a hablar del Mariel?” (Aren’t you going to talk about Mariel?).3 At the time of the recording, Miami was a city in chaos roiled by racial tension and the Mariel boat crisis.4 Cubans had stormed the Peruvian embassy in Havana in hopes of securing political asylum. In an effort to take control of the narrative, Fidel Castro allowed people to leave via the port of Mariel—in fact openly insisted that anyone who wanted to leave the country could do so. Castro claimed that he was ridding Cuba of its “undesirables”—criminals, drug abusers, homosexuals, and others he categorized as socially deviant.5 The Miami Herald, voice of the white establishment and hostile to the Cuban population at the time, played a key role in disseminating these characterizations. The depressed state of the Miami economy, conflicting opinions about the marielitos within the exile community, and the backlash by the white establishment due to the “uncomfortably large Cuban population” created an atmosphere of heightened tension for all Cubans in Miami at the time.6
So when a man in the audience prompted Alvarez Guedes to address the unfolding crisis in the middle of his set, the air was instantly sucked out of the room, leaving an anxious silence in its wake. The interjection seemed to catch Alvarez Guedes off guard. All of his standup performances were well planned, and this is the only album out of thirty-two in which the comedian can be heard breaking his routine and interacting with his audience in a direct, seemingly unscripted dialogue.7 After some hesitation, he replied:
“No chico, lo del Mariel es, no le veo el ángulo humorístico a eso. Eso es muy dramático. Porque están utilizando a los cubanos otra vez, los comunistas. Están aprovechándose. Saben que los que son amantes de la libertad son también amantes de la familia. Entonces están aprovechando esas circunstancias.” (No man, I don’t see the humorous angle to that. That is very dramatic. Because they are using the Cubans again, the communists. They are taking advantage. They know that the lovers of freedom also love their families and so they are taking advantage of the circumstances.)8
Remarkably though, despite the disruption of his usual performance practice, Alvarez Guedes successfully reverses the building tide of tension through a seamless shift back into his comic persona. He ends his commentary on the boatlift with the following quip about the difficult conditions Cubans endured while awaiting passage: “Lo que cobran es una barbaridad para las cosas: un galón de agua diez pesos, una cerveza quince pesos, un filete treinta pesos. ¡Pa’ cagar hay que pagar siete pesos allí! ¡Dos pesos por la bolsa y cinco para el que lo va a tirar!” (What they [Cuban price gougers] charge is outrageous: ten dollars for a gallon of water, fifteen for a beer, thirty for a steak. Even to take a shit you have to pay seven bucks! Two for the bag and five for the guy who has to get rid of it!).9 This unexpected comic shift instantly dispels the unease in the room. All at once and for a full twenty-four seconds after the punchline, the audience communicates its relief with bursts of laughter accompanied by clapping, moans, and screeches of delight that can be heard on the track even as Alvarez Guedes attempts to segue back into his routine. Audience members can be heard exhaling, feeling saved from a potentially unpleasurable turn to the evening. One man lets out a prolonged “ayyyy” as he sighs in comic relief. Another audibly declares, “Está muy bueno,” as the men and women around him catch their breath. In a span of fifty-five seconds, Alvarez Guedes successfully reroutes his audience’s affective bearing toward Mariel from anxiety to a state of relieved comic pleasure.
When prompted to engage the topic of Mariel, the comedian first responds with a serious, grave tone consistent with exile political talking points and complete with a reference to the family-crushing comunistas. Indeed, the initial tone and language Alvarez Guedes deploys in his response are consistent with dominant representations of the exile community. They reflect the Cuban America chronicled so elaborately in the media: rowdy protests in the streets denouncing Fidel Castro and the Clinton administration during the Elián González saga come to mind. It was the Cuban America of presidential elections—an irascible bunch easily provoked, a Republican voting bloc that supports the candidate with the hardest line on Cuba, or put more appropriately, the candidate who can most passionately parrot the same empty anti-Castro rhetoric and punctuate it with a final, triumphant, English-inflected Cuba Leebray!10
But the wheezing of audience members catching their breath and the high-pitched staccato chuckles in response to Alvarez Guedes’s comic twist communicate an intensity of experience that demands attention. I imagine people drying their eyes, faces reddening, and doubled-over. There is a choral quality to the laughter, which produces an invitation to the listener that says, “Join us.” Though I have heard this recording dozens of times, I cannot help but be affected by laughter’s contagious properties. I close one eye, my chest begins to quake, and I become part of the chorus of laughers “responding to an exigency of life in common.”11 This life in common is marked by the shared understanding of that historical moment, the setup and twist, and a recognition of how Alvarez Guedes’s performance feels Cuban—a feeling triggered by his accent, tone, the words he chooses, and the scatological framework for his punchline. This moment signals to me another way for thinking about the relationship between affect, politics, and everyday life. What if, instead of quickly moving from the humor to the somberness surrounding Mariel, we lingered on that ludic intensity? What if we followed Alvarez Guedes’s lead, laughed along with the audience, and listened to the rest of the album? What are the possibilities that arise when we understand this joke not just as an animated interruption in the usual discourse surrounding tense moments in Cuban diasporic history but as an example of the ludic as a consistent strategy for narrating the present and what it means to be Cuban off the island?
Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America focuses on momentos de diversión like the one I have just described—moments of diversion, of play, of laughter—in order to make two primary arguments. The first provides an affective complement to Cuban American and Latina/o Studies more broadly by shifting critical emphasis away from feelings that so often dominate academic conversations around minoritarian experience in the United States—the anger, pain, loss, and disappointment expressed in the first part of Alvarez Guedes’s response to the question about Mariel. Though I engage these feelings alongside the ludic, I am more interested in the critical possibilities that arise in the bursts of laughter inspired by a comedian’s punchline, a prank call to Fidel Castro, or a foul-mouthed puppet’s take on politics. In that laughter, I “hear” the long history of humor as both an object of study in the Cuban intellectual tradition and as a key component in cultural production on and off the island. I can hear a mode of relationality, a ludic sociability, echoed throughout the history of the Cuban diaspora and fostered by the consumption and circulation of popular culture. By paying close attention to that laughter and the language and performance that produce it, I unravel how ludic popular culture “provides emotional ‘paradigm scenarios,’ inculcating particular ways of feeling, emotive modes that have political and social consequences” as communities imagine themselves over time.12 And perhaps most importantly, it allows me to get at a basic question that I will address throughout this book: What do ludic popular culture and the feelings it inspires do in the diasporic context?
The book’s second major argument utilizes a cultural studies approach to highlight the massive demographic and generational shifts within the Cuban diaspora—Miami specifically. South Florida is home to the largest population of Cubans living in the United States. Scholars like Ricardo Ortíz have been right to point out the problematic dominance of Miami in the study of Cuban America.13 Most scholarship has focused on the exile generation that arrived between 1959 and 1973 and settled there.14 But Cuban Miami has changed a great deal and cultural studies scholarship has been slow to catch up. More Cubans arrived in the United States between 2000 and 2010 than in any past decade.15 Together, the US-born and arrivals since the 1990s now represent the majority of the diaspora. But while these cohorts differ from the older exile generation in many ways, there has been little scholarship on how these shifts manifest themselves in quotidian life and cultural production. Diversión aims to fill that void.
To make these arguments, I begin in the 1970s and quickly move to the twenty-first century with close readings of a popular culture archive that includes standup comedy, morning talk radio shows, festivals, television, and social media content. Starting in the 1970s with the exile community allows me to push back against the characterization of this segment of the diaspora as mostly melancholic while detailing the established Cuban Miami that later generations will contend with in the twenty-first century. Though the primary sources that I examine have received little attention from scholars, their popularity and status as cultural productions for and by Cuban audiences shed light on how succeeding generations have negotiated their relationships to the United States, each other, and a sense of cubanía—a Cuban cultural identity.16 Despite being a word that suggests a kind of cultural essence, cubanía has functioned as a “vague concept, malleable and adaptable.”17 Popular culture allows me to track how cubanía has been formulated in the diaspora in various ways at different historical junctures. Such an approach reveals alternative genealogies of the diaspora and its internal diversity through analysis of artists and popular culture that travel in and between the United States and Cuba. This transnational framework imagines cubanía “as a structure of feeling that supercedes national boundaries and pedagogies” and disrupts the ossified Cold War logic of two Cubas separated by political ideologies and government policies.18 This logic, long untenable, has been weakened further by the December 17, 2014, announcement regarding the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. In this study, I explain how ludic popular culture has been a means for, and a reflection of, changes that have profoundly affected life on and off the island in the last twenty-five years.
Diversión Defined?
In centering this project on what I am calling diversión, I am participating in a long tradition of examining the ludic in Cuban culture by island-based intellectuals.19 This scholarly conversation has often focused on a term that has accrued over one hundred years of scholarship in Cuba, choteo.20 Choteo can be described as a form of irreverent humor and mockery common among the masses, articulated through the idiomatic specificity of Cuban popular culture, and highly suspicious of authority in all forms. The most quoted scholar on choteo, Cuban cultural critic Jorge Mañach, describes it as “something that all Cubans have” and a “typically Cuban form of relation” in his 1928 essay “Indagación del choteo.”21 Since he weighed in on the subject, many critics have invoked the term to describe Cuban cultural production and the “character” of the Cuban people.
Such essentializing language raises red flags. For one, the attitudes and practices described above in relation to choteo are not exclusive to Cuban culture. In fact, critics have explored the similarities between choteo and other comic forms like Puerto Rican guachafita and Mexican relajo.22 Others have suggested that choteo can be found throughout the Caribbean.23 So what makes Cuban choteo so Cuban? Why has it been claimed so strongly? In his study of humor in Puerto Rican literature on and off the island, Israel Reyes explains: “It is true that nations often claim particular species of the comic as part of their national character, and Spanish American and Hispanic Caribbean nations are no exceptions.”24 In the early years of the republic, Cuban academics consistently claimed, cited, and studied choteo as part of a larger intellectual project and debate geared toward defining what it meant to be “Cuban” in the newly independent nation.25 Today, choteo continues to be cited as a means to describe the Cuban national character. Juan Antonio García Borrero, writing in 2004, sums up this sentiment succinctly: “Está bien claro que Cuba sin choteo no sería Cuba” (It is very clear that Cuba without choteo wouldn’t be Cuba).26
Academic studies by island-based intellectuals have taken cues for studying choteo and Cuban humor more broadly from quotidian life and cultural production. The spirit of choteo was a central element of teatro bufo—a form of Cuban comic vernacular theater that first appeared in the mid-nineteenth century featuring characters in blackface.27 An irreverent tradition of political cartooning extending back to the mid-nineteenth century has long utilized choteo to skewer the powerful.28 It also appears in the work of artists like filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and writers Mirta Yáñez, Virgilio Piñera, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante.29 The Cuban love affair with the ludic also registered on television where, as Yeidy Rivero points out, the first program was a comedy.30 But while artists and scholars have mobilized choteo and the intellectual history behind it in the service of their own projects, the word itself is rarely used in quotidian life.31 Instead, jodedera, dar cuero, and relajo often function as synonyms for choteo to varying degrees in everyday speech. Defining the differences between comic forms can be tricky and translation increases the difficulty.32 What these terms all do is suggest a kind of levity, of not taking people or things seriously, even if they merit just that.
Is it possible to create a typology of ludic terms in Cuban popular culture complete with definitions? Perhaps, but such a project will not be the focus of this book. I am not interested in distinguishing how choteo might be similar to or different from say, relajo. Instead, I choose the word diversión as a means to index a host of terms like choteo, relajo, jodedera, and burla, which populate Cuban scholarly and vernacular expression. At times, I will use certain terms, with qualification, when it is particularly apt in the context of the material I am discussing. Choteo, especially, carries a significant amount of weight because of the long intellectual history of the term and its anti-authoritarian bent. But the general attractiveness of diversión as this project’s organizing logic is its imprecision. Its broadness allows me to stay away from what I consider the less interesting conversation around classification. The discursive latitude of diversión allows me to place a variety of ludic cultural forms into conversation to illuminate the ways in which levity and play broadly conceived have shaped the social in dramatic ways.
I deploy diversión on two complementary levels. On the first, I use the term to describe ludic popular culture texts or moments as “archive[s] of feelings” charged with “feelings and emotions that are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception.”33 Diversión is the morning radio show you listen to on your morning drive that helps to set the tone for your day. It is the funny meme you circulate among your friends on social media that only they would understand. Diversión is the ridiculous “Cuban” nickname your aunt has given to one of your friends. It is the standup comedy show you attend on the weekend where gestures and jokes intersect to produce comic pleasure. It is born out of the cultural clashes that occur as Cuban Spanish and English meet in Hialeah to produce mistranslations or when you try to communicate the meaning of idiomatic phrases like “le zumba el mango” in English.34 As these examples suggest, a key component of my analysis will be a focus on language. More committed to wordplay and the absurd than slapstick, an analysis of diversión must be attentive to how language produces comic moments and ludic sociability over time. Diversión is the language used to narrate shared pasts and presents with designs on a potentially pleasurable future.
On the second level, I use diversión to describe the performative logic of these cultural forms—not only what is said but how it is said. As I will highlight throughout the book, el cubaneo—the sonic and gestural repertoire of cubanía—goes hand in hand with diversión.35 The pronounced aural dimension of much of the material under scrutiny here demands that we “listen in detail” if we are to fully appreciate how sound informs the performative palette of cubanía.36 I am talking about how a laugh can sound Cuban to a listener with a finely tuned ear. The sonic logic of diversión is at work when I call out “oyeeeee” with a heavy and exaggerated Cuban accent in the hotel lobby of a busy conference to get the attention of a fellow Cuban American colleague—a kind of hailing through jodedera. Diversión can also be signaled by the body through gesticulation; it is the hand waving and the flip of the wrist that orchestrates the telling of a story. One need only watch a clip of Fidel Castro’s marathon speeches to appreciate the relationship between gesture and meaning. Interrogating diversión as a performative form of relation highlights the potential for the kind of intimacy and ludic sociability upon which communal identifications are built and projected. The pain, the trauma, and the melancholy of exile are often invoked to highlight how the Cuban diaspora has cohered historically. In this book, I make the argument that diversión has been just as vital.
The Archive of Diversión
In the previous section I cited the long history of diversión in Cuba as both a cultural practice and academic area of interest stretching back to the nineteenth century. But what about the diaspora? Those who left Cuba? It did not take me long to discover that diversión had been making the trip from Cuba to the United States for over one hundred years. It was always there, hiding in plain sight, molding community formations and the means of sociability alongside the brooding lamentations of exile. Continuing a long tradition of political cartooning on the island, Cuban exiles in New York published newspapers like Cacarajícara, which functioned like a nineteenth-century version of the Onion, complete with cartoons and satirical commentary directed at Spanish colonial rule.37 Puerto Rican Bernardo Vega, in his memoirs of life in New York City in the early twentieth century, thought it important to devote time to describe how jokes served as a means to promote ludic sociability among the politically engaged tabaqueros, “especially on the part of the Cuban comrades.”38 Scholars like Antonio López and Christina D. Abreu have captured the relationship between race and forms of diversión in New York City from the 1920s through the 1950s through readings of print culture, bufo performances, the Cuban music scene, and social clubs.39
When Cubans began settling in the United States shortly after Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959, diversión quickly became a highly visible and popular way for negotiating the new space of exile, developing the emotional tools for managing the strain of displacement, and establishing a sense of cultural continuity across national boundaries. Zig-Zag, a wildly popular satirical newspaper that began its run in Cuba in 1938, initially supported the Revolution. But when the paper’s humor ran afoul of the government, key players fled to the United States.40 By 1962, Zig-Zag was back up and running in Miami under the name Zig-Zag Libre. The new incarnation featured deeply critical political cartoons of Fidel Castro accompanied by drawings and columns addressing life in exile. It would be joined by other satirical newspapers like Chispa, Cubalegre, Loquillo, and La Política Cómica among others through the decades.41
But diversión was not just a way to articulate political critiques of communist Cuba. It was a crucial means for keeping cultural practices and memories alive, especially for children born or reared primarily in the United States. In 1964, an event called Añorada Cuba (Yearning for Cuba) debuted in Miami and featured music, dances, and dramatic works performed by the children of exiles. Younger children could enjoy magazines like Payaso (1967) and Revista Cabalgata Infantil (1972), which billed itself as “The Magazine of Cuban Childhood” and offered Cuban history in digestible tidbits alongside pictures of children exhibiting their artistic talents.42 Zig-Zag Libre held political cartooning contests for children who could draw the best caricatures of Cuban government officials.
Figure I.1. Zig-Zag Libre, February 16, 1963. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.
Diversión was certainly on the agenda for adults as well. Magazines like Espectáculos and Showtime, which combined celebrity gossip with nightlife guides, started being published in the mid-1960s. These magazines featured interviews with exiled artists along with articles with titles like “Su artista favorito puede ser un comunista” (Your Favorite Artist Could Be a Communist).43 But without question the most consistently popular form of adult diversión came in the form of theater.44 The first play to take up themes of exile was a comedy called Hamburgers y sirenazos written in 1962 by Pedro Román and debuted in 1969, but it would not be the last. Over the years, comedies began to dominate Miami’s theater landscape.45 These works were often written, performed, and staged by talent from Cuba who had fled after the Revolution and thus were familiar to many exiles. Because demand was so high, many theaters dedicated themselves to staging comedies, which often included some combination of political satire, physical comedy, and sexual innuendo.46 But like all successful comedies, the plays spoke to issues facing the community in their moment. Reflecting community frustration with the durability of the Cuban government, Armando Roblán, famous for his impersonation of Fidel Castro, starred in No hay mal que dure 100 años … ni pueblo que lo resista (1979) (There Is No Evil That Lasts Forever … Nor Community That Can Take It), written by famed satirist Alberto González. When Soviet economic support for Cuba dried up in the early 1990s, exiles believed Castro would soon fall. Comic theater again answered the call with plays like A Cuba me voy hoy mismo … que se acabó el comunismo! (I’m Going to Cuba Because Communism Is Over!), performed in 1990 and starring Norma Zúñiga and Sandra Haydee, two veteran actresses of the Miami stage. These satires were joined by bawdy comedies about impotent men, cheating spouses, and even taxes. Today, the comic theater scene of Miami remains active, though certainly not as lively as it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Radio programs like Zig-Zag Radio, La Fonomanía, and La Mogolla took aim at the Cuban government and the excesses of Cuban Miami alike. Movies such as Amigos and El Super used dark humor to work through the pain and disorientation of exile. Cuba Nostalgia, La Feria de los Municipios de Cuba en el Exilio, and early instantiations of the Calle 8 Festival celebrated a narrative of prerevolutionary Cuba through the lens of nostalgia. ¿Qué Pasa, USA?, a bilingual sitcom that followed three generations of the Peña family as they navigated life in Miami, was wildly popular from 1977 to 1980.47
I offer this broad overview not to suggest that this book will take an encyclopedic approach to documenting diversión but to communicate its pervasiveness in a number of contexts and to assure the reader that the moments that I have chosen to examine more carefully in the chapters to come are not isolated incidents cherry-picked to fit some contrived scholarly paradigm. Instead, the cultural forms I examine in this book have long been deployed and celebrated in diasporic culture: the enduring popularity of standup comedy; radio and its ubiquity in the history of Cuban Miami; and the continued staging of cubanía at fairs and festivals, among others. By selecting contemporary manifestations of popular culture practices with a long history in the diasporic context, I am able to examine not only how Cuban Miami has changed but also how the cultural forms themselves have been transformed to meet the demands of contemporary audiences and the potential of technological advances. The spirit of satirical periodiquitos of old now inform YouTube videos and memes produced by groups like Los Pichy Boys, whose content has been viewed millions of times on social media. Counterrevolutionary comedy produced in Miami once circulated in Cuba in the form of books and cassettes passed hand to hand. Now, thousands of gigabytes of content circulate throughout the island courtesy of thumb and hard drives. My analysis of diversión, then, is deeply committed to understanding a changing Cuban diaspora and the aesthetic and performative evolution of the often-ephemeral cultural forms that profoundly shape everyday life.
Figure I.2. Promotional material for No hay mal que dure 100 años … ni pueblo que lo resista, 1979. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.
I will argue throughout this book that this archive of diversión, and its broad impact on life in Cuban Miami, cannot be divorced from strategies for capital accumulation. But a crucial distinction is in order. This is not a study of how Cubanness or latinidad more broadly has been commodified for white audiences in the United States.48 Diversión, as it is conceived here, is not the overpriced Cuban restaurant in your town covered in sepia prints of ’57 Chevys and servers in freshly pressed guayaberas. This does not mean that this popular culture functions outside the world of the market. Instead, I argue that analyzing popular culture created by and for ethnic-racialized subjects provides a glimpse into understanding the role capital plays in mediating social relations and cultural production on local and transnational levels: the “selling” of nostalgia in the form of prerevolutionary knickknacks in stores and online; the circulation of popular culture between Miami and Cuba and the financial considerations that go into those flows; and corporate media conglomerates like Univision muscling into the local radio market in Miami and their influence on content.
If diversión has been so pervasive because of its resonance among the diaspora and the role of capital, why has there been so little scholarship on these forms and practices within Cuban American Studies? This lack of engagement with the ludic can be explained partially by the incongruity it faces when put into dialogue with the “usual” affective registers used to describe the exile experience.49 Exile is displacement; displacement is painful. The echoes of loss, abandonment, and deracination encoded within the word exile and the baggage it carries with it have limited the term’s signifying potential. But this equation of exile with loss and its attendant hardships cannot be explained only by how the concept signifies in broader scholarly and popular imaginations. The relationship between exile, affect, and politics must also be taken into account. In the Cuban context, the feelings associated with exile can be invoked to reinforce claims on Cuban American exceptionalism based on political motivations for leaving the island. This performance has been necessary to maintain a claim on the privileges extended to Cuban émigrés: a pathway to legal status through the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 and access to federal programs created by the US government to aid those fleeing communism during the Cold War.50 Of course, I do not mean to suggest in using the word performance that exilic affect is somehow disingenuous. Instead, I seek to stress the importance of affect as a means for making claims to the benefits of exile as a category, especially in the context of the Cold War United States.51 Historically, the Cuban American lobby in Washington and elected officials have worn the pathos of exile on their sleeves while pushing for a more confrontational foreign policy toward Cuba.
I do not seek to delegitimize the many works of scholarship and art that have foregrounded the very real pain of exile to tell the story of Cuban America. That pain, too, is part of this study with diversión serving as a means to process and manage it. But in privileging the ludic, I hope to get at something as prevalent and quotidian as pain—the shared pleasures within a community that play a vital role in representing and shaping the present. The material I examine in this book does not win awards or attract a great deal of academic attention. It cannot be found on syllabi. The archive I have assembled is most often engaged on the living room couch in front of a television, long car rides with Alvarez Guedes albums playing, social media feeds, celebrations with family and friends, or nights out on the town. I have attended the festivals and interviewed comedians and event organizers inside and outside of Cuba. I have spent a great deal of time on Facebook and in the deepest recesses of the Cuban blogosphere, and I have gotten sucked in to an untold number of YouTube content loops. For years, I have experienced these popular culture forms not only as an exercise in academic analysis, but also as a means to make my way through the world, like so many others. This work has brought me a great deal of pleasure through the years but it has also brought me disappointment, even a mix of the two simultaneously. It is this multivalence of popular culture, its ability to bring pleasure as well as “rage, and frustration about its silences, exclusions and assaults,” that I take up now.52
Arroz con Mango
The archive of diversión detailed above highlights those cultural forms meant to make people feel good through laughter and communal celebrations. But it is crucial to stir the pot a bit and introduce an analytical thread that will appear throughout this study: the role of race and sexuality. Throughout the writing of this book, colleagues—especially those with knowledge of Cuban popular culture—have expressed enthusiasm mixed with a sentiment best captured with a phrase from Cuban vernacular speech: arroz con mango. The phrase, which literally translates to rice with mango, describes a messy or complicated situation, a contradiction that produces headaches. For a scholar deeply committed to critical race theory and social justice projects, studying diversión can often result in generous helpings of arroz con mango. Comic tropes around blackness, women, and homosexuality continue to function as reliable, if not tired elements, of popular culture production. The relationship between race, gender, sexuality, and diversión represents a kind of transnational continuity identifiable throughout “Greater Cuba.”53 This most clearly manifests itself in humor that is dominated by men and utilizes representational strategies inflected with racism, homophobia, and sexism. It is in exploring this basic dynamic—that feeling good can come at the expense of others—that we can further grasp the intersecting, and at times contradictory, narratives that affect how communities come to imagine themselves.
I address this dynamic throughout the book, especially with regard to race and the production of Cuban American whiteness.54 Antonio López has taken up this question directly, discussing how this whiteness has been historically constituted “at a distance from the majority of island Afro Cubans, yet in close, segregated, often conflictive proximity to African Americans in the United States, especially in Miami.”55 Despite scholars suggesting that Cubans paid little attention to African Americans in Miami, the popular archive indicates otherwise.56 I will show the ways racial codes from the United States and Cuba have and continue to be melded together in a thoroughly transnational sense to reproduce this Cuban American whiteness over time. It is in the realm of the popular that we can see the crucial role race has played in consolidating a Cuban American identity in South Florida.
Focusing on how narratives of whiteness circulate in popular culture is essential for understanding social relations not only among Cuban Americans but across Latina/o groups. While race and ethnicity in the Latina/o context is often discussed as in conflict with United States regimes of white supremacy, scholarship has examined the place of whiteness and anti-black sentiment within Latina/o communities.57 More of this work is necessary. Attention to ludic popular culture, in particular, can provide access to those notions that circulate within a community, unsaid yet understood. Inside jokes and ideas about the other are often invoked under the sign of the comic as audiences revel in having narratives of group identity with wide currency defamiliarized through humor. Examining popular forms can be an especially insightful avenue for understanding the ways in which these communities come to understand themselves in a quotidian register and how negative conceptions around race and other ethnic groups structure social relations, even acting as a barrier to broader coalitional politics.
But the point of considering race and discrimination is not to somehow separate “good” diversión from the “bad.” As Stuart Hall usefully reminds us, cultural forms are not “either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic. Whereas, they are deeply contradictory; they play on contradictions, especially when they function in the domain of the ‘popular.’ ”58 The binary logic of resistance/suppression does not adequately account for the messiness of, and our complex attachments to, popular culture forms that can produce pleasure, anger, and disappointment, sometimes simultaneously. Keeping this in mind will allow for a more nuanced understanding of how racist jokes can be uttered right after a satirical skewing of Anglo discrimination in South Florida. It can shed light on how blackface representations on Miami television in the twenty-first century reproduce racist tropes from Cuba that hearken back to the nineteenth century but also play a role in unraveling conservative resistance to improved relations between the United States and Cuba.
A critical approach attentive to the contradictions of popular culture moves us away from simply identifying racist representations and toward asking more productive questions. Why have these representations persisted in diasporic popular culture despite profound generational and demographic changes that include not only original exiles and their children, but also Cubans born and raised in a post-revolutionary Cuba that claims to have mostly eradicated racism? Why do US-born Cuban Americans continue to invest in a narrative of a Cuban identity at all? To answer these questions, I will pay special attention to historical context and most importantly, to how narratives built upon whiteness and heteronormativity have circulated and functioned as a means to claim a hegemonic identity in South Florida with its attendant privileges.
But of course, as Hall reminds us, the world is rarely so neat. It would be reductive to characterize Cuban popular culture and its consumption as an orderly two-way street to explain the intersection of popular culture, privilege, and power. Popular culture must, as Richard Iton explains, “be understood as a result of the creative process and its embedded intentions; the potentially quite distinct and even contrasting—but equally creative—use made of them by others; and the feedback mechanisms and interpolative possibilities linking these various stages.”59 Heeding Iton, I make space for the difficult, fraught relationships one can have with dominant narratives of Cuban American identity, especially in relation to race and politics. This ambivalence manifests itself most clearly along generational lines when US-born Cuban Americans, for instance, may revel in the performative aspects of diversión but may not subscribe to conservative politics and racist representations when they do arise. Can one enjoy the way a joke is told—the cadence, the words used, the accent, the style of it all—and still feel ill at ease with the punchline? We can laugh, but it does not always mean it feels good. This is the routine dissonance that often frames cultural consumption in quotidian life. These moments can reveal the disidentificatory potential of diversión, the potential for “identification with and total disavowal of the dominant culture’s normative identificatory nodes.”60 This disidentificatory mode can have real effects, acting as a means to levy critique and enact a cubanía at odds with the troublesome representations that can creep up in popular culture.
Popular culture can offer communities a mechanism for self-critique without challenging the desire for group cohesion. Here, we once again see the contradictions of popular culture—its potential for reifying and challenging dominant narratives, at times simultaneously. These are the contradictions this book will live in. Engaging moments that can make us uncomfortable but nonetheless offer pleasures lays bare the complexity of our feelings and attachments within an area of cultural experience so often seen as overdetermined, “good” or “bad”—the popular. A comer arroz con mango.
Examining the relationship between race and diversión provides a means for understanding how Cubans in the diaspora have imagined themselves in the United States and how that imaginary has had both sustained and integral effects on social relations in South Florida. But this study also seeks to make an intervention in studies of race, sexuality, and ethnicity in the United States more broadly by “diverting” attention away from cultural forms that privilege the pain, anger, and disappointment in the lives of ethnic-racialized subjects. To be sure, scholars in fields like Queer Studies, Native American Studies, and African American Studies in particular have pointed to this imbalance and have shown what analysis of ludic forms can teach us. Sara Warner argues that her focus on “gaiety” in LGBT performance “serves as a rejoinder to the long-lasting romance with mourning and melancholia in queer theory.”61 Glenda Carpio explains that “African American humor has been an underestimated realm of analysis” in her book on black humor in relation to the legacy of slavery.62 Yet the question remains: Why has so little been published?
The answer lies, in part, in the history of these fields. Race and ethnic studies in the United States as we know them were made possible by the rise of protest movements. Institutional recognition has always been a fight, and maintaining that tenuous foothold in the university has been a constant challenge. This has no doubt affected the direction of scholarship. Focusing on pleasure and play would seem to run counter to the “real” work at hand. As the struggle for representation continues, the need for “serious” scholarship that legitimates the field has inadvertently created an imbalance in how we write about the lives of ethnic-racialized subjects.63 In Latina/o Studies, a field I am deeply engaged with as a scholar and teacher, popular forms of humor and play have rarely been the explicit focus of academic studies.64 Diversión foregrounds the ludic not only to provide an affective complement to the fields of Cuban and Latina/o Studies but also to better understand the necessarily complicated relationships people have with popular culture representations that capture a range of feelings that frame and enable social relations.
A Changing Cuban Miami
Popular culture circulates and succeeds because of its relationship to time: “The particularity of time in popular culture is that it is momentary, that with all its embeddedness in tradition and the historical past, it is present, it is contemporary, it is always now.”65 Concentrating on popular culture from the 1970s to the 2010s allows me to provide the quotidian texture necessary to understand this book’s second major intervention: tracing the degree to which the Cuban diaspora has changed over time in relation to politics, feelings toward the island, and the ways in which a Cuban cultural identity is performed publically—especially since the mid-1990s. The balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994 was the catalyst for policy agreements between the United States and Cuba that initiated the steady influx of Cubans into Miami that continues today. In 1994, over 30,000 Cubans took to the sea on makeshift rafts bound for the United States in response to the crushing scarcity of the Special Period.66 In 1994 and 1995, the United States and Cuba agreed to stem the tide of rafters by negotiating migration accords that included a provision that would allow at least 20,000 Cubans a year to migrate to the United States. This agreement fundamentally changed the character of the Cuban diaspora in the 1990s and beyond. According to Jorge Duany, “From 1994 to 2013, the greatest wave of migrants from Cuba arrived to the United States since the beginnings of the Cuban Revolution (563,740 Cubans legally admitted to the United States).”67 Between 2000 and 2009, 305,989 Cubans migrated to the United States—more than in any other decade in the history of migration between the two countries.68 This population is larger than the first wave of Cubans who fled between 1959 and 1962 and greater than the number who arrived in the United States during the Freedom Flights of 1965–1973.69
With the joint announcement regarding the reestablishment of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014, the number of Cubans leaving the island by raft or through border crossings (mostly Mexican) without visas has skyrocketed. In fiscal year 2011, 7,759 Cubans came to the United States this way. In 2015, 43,159 Cubans arrived in the country via ports of entry.70 They are motivated by the same difficulties that have driven Cubans to leave the island for decades: material scarcity, the search for better economic opportunities for themselves and their families, and politics, though much less a direct factor than the latter reasons. But perhaps most urgently, the uptick of migrants can be attributed to the fear that the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that guarantees residency to any Cuban who sets foot on United States soil after one year might be repealed in the face of warming relations.
How has this influx from the island changed Cuban Miami? Trends in polling reveal that time of arrival powerfully affects one’s position on Cuba-related politics. By 2008, “only 45 percent of South Florida’s Cuban Americans continued to support the embargo. Moreover, sharp inter-cohort differences emerged. Whereas nearly two-thirds of pre-Mariel (1980) immigrants continued to support the embargo, less than one-third of post-1998 immigrants did.”71 Those with a fresher experience of life in Cuba along with strong kinship ties are the least likely to support hardline political stances toward Cuba. Arrivals since the 1990s are more like other migrants from Latin America who come to achieve greater economic stability for themselves and those they left behind. Hundreds of thousands now return to the island every year.72 Remittances have increased significantly in the twenty-first century with an estimated $2 billion a year flowing from the diaspora to Cuba.73 Cuba’s termination of the much-maligned exit visa and the United States’ five-year visa program, both instituted in 2013, have meant more freedom of movement between the two countries. Contact and exchange will likely increase if relations between the United States and Cuba continue on the path toward full normalization.
Some academic studies have called attention to these shifts. Susan Eckstein has studied how more recent arrivals to the United States are transforming life in Cuba today as a result of the “social and economic ties across borders” that have “eroded socialism as the islanders knew it.”74 Chris Girard, Guillermo Grenier, and Hugh Gladwin have chronicled the “declining symbolic significance” of the embargo among Cuban Americans in South Florida.75 Yet the mainstream narrative of Cubans in the United States as a homogenous group united in its conservative politics has been stubbornly resistant to change despite shifting political opinions among exiles and dramatic demographic and generational changes: “Because exile serves as such a powerful unifying experience for a people, the tendency has been to categorize all Cubans living in exile as sharing the same political identity and political culture.”76
While arrivals since the 1990s have reached record numbers, the largest cohort of Cubans consists of the US-born—primarily the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of the original exile generation. Of the approximately 2 million Cuban and Cuban Americans counted in the United States census, 40 percent were born in the United States. Because most US-born Cuban Americans have never lived on the island, cubanía is learned from parents, family, and the anti-Castro media and symbolism that have historically saturated Cuban Miami.77 Despite this, poll data has shown that US-born Cuban Americans are less committed to hardline stances toward Cuba. The lack of personal experience with the Revolution allows for some emotional distance and, on many Cuba-related issues, a far less conservative approach.78 This is not to say that one will find many supporters of Castro among the US-born. The Castro brothers, along with Che Guevara, are symbols charged with contempt—the reasons for the “lost Cuba” invoked by older family members, friends, and Cuban Miami’s larger anti-communist imaginary. Nonetheless, the US-born generation is more open to dismantling the embargo, allowing travel, and engaging the Cuban government in dialogue than their parents and grandparents.79 This group has completely fallen through the cracks of contemporary scholarship. Throughout the book, I detail how the US-born are performing and invoking cubanía through diversión and what this means for the present and future of the Cuban diaspora. In this context, the translatability of diversión into the English diversion is particularly useful as I chart the relationships to cubanía enacted by US-born generations.
Because the majority of Cubans in the United States today is composed of the US-born and arrivals since the 1990s, the term exile with its attendant political and emotional baggage fails to capture the reality of the diaspora today not only in Miami, but also in cities like Houston and Louisville, which have growing Cuban populations. For this reason, I use the term diaspora when referring to Cubans in the United States generally. I use the phrase exile community to reference those who arrived during the earlier waves from 1959–1973. Today, fervent anti-Castro politics, the Republican Party, and conservative positions on US-Cuba relations no longer grip the diaspora the way they did historically. This is the shift I aim to illuminate in my work through an emphasis on how these changes look, sound, feel, and resonate in quotidian life. Statistics cannot fully capture how different generational cohorts interact with and represent each other. Nor can they capture the points of conflict and connection. Diversión will serve as the means by which the statistics come to life by highlighting the multiple narratives of cubanía that are being articulated and the inherent messiness of diasporic formations.
The book proceeds in five chapters. In the first, “Un Tipo Típico: Alvarez Guedes Takes the Stage,” I discuss in more detail the career of beloved exile comedian Guillermo Alvarez Guedes. I use his comedy to understand the centrality of the ludic at a moment in the history of the exile community rarely discussed in playful terms: the late 1970s and 1980s. The Mariel crisis, domestic terrorism against alleged Castro sympathizers, and the drug trade in Miami created strife within the community and turned the tide of public opinion against Cuban Americans. The chapter argues that Alvarez Guedes’s popular comic performances helped to consolidate a Cuban exile identity premised on whiteness and heteronormativity while simultaneously pushing back against discrimination against Cubans from Anglo Miamians.
In the second chapter, “Cuban Miami on the Air,” the book moves to the twenty-first century in order to begin a conversation about a changing Cuban Miami wherein the majority of Cubans is made up of the US-born generations and more recent arrivals since 1994. I historicize the prominent role of radio in Cuban Miami—specifically the conservative genre of exile talk radio—and then devote myself to comedy bits performed on the Enrique y Joe Show and the Enrique Santos Show. These radio programs sat at the top of Miami’s ratings charts throughout the 2000s. Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero, both US-born Cuban Americans, proudly performed the narrative of cubanía learned from the exile generation through their use of idiomatic expressions, accents, and their famous prank call to Fidel Castro himself. But their satires and pranks also marked a shift in the handling of Cuba-related topics on the air through the articulation of a far less conservative approach that demonstrates how a Cuban diasporic identity need not be bundled with a particular political ideology. Contextualizing these performances in relation to their audience of other US-born Cuban Americans, the corporate investment of Univision in the Miami radio market in the 2000s, and more recent arrivals from the island provides a means to understand Cuban Miami’s shifting demographics and media landscape in the 2000s.
Chapter 3, “Nostalgic Pleasures,” takes up a concept that has achieved a kind of keyword status in Cuban American Studies: nostalgia. The chapter tracks nostalgia not as an ambivalent sentiment but as a historically public form of diversión, paying special attention to a festival held annually since 1999 in Miami called Cuba Nostalgia. Cuba Nostalgia has celebrated pre-Castro Cuba through a combination of spectacle and consumption. Musical genres popular before the Revolution play while businesses dedicated to selling Cuban memorabilia dot the fairgrounds. With the demographics of Cuban Miami rapidly shifting, I argue that Cuba Nostalgia is not only a means for reveling in nostalgic memories of a pre-Castro Cuba but also a nostalgia for nostalgia—a longing for a feeling that could be counted on to rally a community historically fractured across class and political lines. The event is a kind of monument in motion to an idealized memory of a united, exilic Miami as that generation fades. Through an examination of the event’s focus on education and consumption, I theorize the ways in which generations of Cubans intersect and interact with this narrative of pre-Castro Cuba in order to reveal the transnational and future-oriented stakes of nostalgia.
Years before Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced the reestablishment of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014, ties between the two countries had been intensifying due to increased contact between the diaspora and the island. In Chapter 4, “The Transnational Life of Diversión,” I examine the flows of ludic popular culture between both spaces in order to elaborate the central contention of this chapter: the movement of popular culture is indicative of the intensification of transnational contact born out of political and demographic changes on both sides and a means by which this intensification occurs. The first part of this chapter focuses on the standup comedy of island-based comedians, which appeals to Cubans who arrived in Miami since 1994—a group rarely discussed in cultural studies scholarship on the diaspora—and its racialized and gendered underpinnings. The second half examines how popular culture produced in the United States circulates in Cuba through a phenomenon called el paquete semanal (the weekly package). El paquete refers to the sale and circulation of media content primarily produced off the island, mainly from the United States. In addition to keeping up with popular American sitcoms and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, television produced by Cubans in South Florida is also immensely popular. People on the island can now watch Cuban artists who have permanently left the island perform nightly on South Florida television. The ubiquitous presence of el paquete and popular culture produced in the United States more broadly across the island are important sites for understanding the social and economic changes occurring in Cuba under Raúl Castro. Looking at the movement of popular culture between the island and the diaspora will also allow me to highlight how intensifying transnational contact, continuity, and exchange are affecting and reflecting the lives of Cubans on and off the island, culturally and economically.
The fifth and final chapter, “Digital Diversión,” moves away from examining geographic locales to consider the rising importance of digital spaces in mediating diasporic identities. In this chapter, I seek to trace how cubanía echoes online through close readings of popular, highly circulated forms of diversión such as parody videos and memes. If Web 2.0 is primarily about sharing content, examining widely circulated forms of diversión online is a powerful means for understanding how and why certain narratives of cubanía resonate. Analysis of this content, in turn, illuminates how the circulation, consumption, and experience of diversión online encourages a ludic sociability that helps to structure one’s engagement with the world online and off. A wide view of this content online also reveals generational tensions and the continued role of race in the mediation of Cuban American whiteness. To do this work, I will closely examine the material of a puppet named Pepe Billete and of Los Pichy Boys—two acts whose material has been viewed millions of times through various social media channels.
Diversión is what we share—the pleasures we experience together as we make our way through the world. It is a world filled with fleeting, ludic moments that are too often passed over or forgotten when the next tragedy strikes. By lingering in these moments, these chapters bring together an archive of popular pleasures over time that tell a story about changes within the Cuban diaspora and the practices and experiences that produce narratives of self and community. At its core, this book seeks to inspire what I experienced when I first listened to all those Alvarez Guedes albums for the first time: a sense of critical possibility, complexity, and yes, even a laugh.
