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
