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
