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
