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
