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
