With the demographics of Cuban Miami rapidly shifting, I argue that Cuba Nostalgia is not only a means for reveling in nostalgic memories of a pre-Castro Cuba but also a nostalgia for nostalgia—a longing for a feeling that could be counted on to rally a community historically fractured across class and political lines. The event is a kind of monument in motion to an idealized memory of a united, exilic Miami as that generation fades. Through an examination of the event’s focus on education and consumption, I theorize the ways in which generations of Cubans intersect and interact with this narrative of pre-Castro Cuba in order to reveal the transnational and future-oriented stakes of nostalgia.
Years before Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced the reestablishment of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014, ties between the two countries had been intensifying due to increased contact between the diaspora and the island. In Chapter 4, “The Transnational Life of Diversión,” I examine the flows of ludic popular culture between both spaces in order to elaborate the central contention of this chapter: the movement of popular culture is indicative of the intensification of transnational contact born out of political and demographic changes on both sides and a means by which this intensification occurs. The first part of this chapter focuses on the standup comedy of island-based comedians, which appeals to Cubans who arrived in Miami since 1994—a group rarely discussed in cultural studies scholarship on the diaspora—and its racialized and gendered underpinnings. The second half examines how popular culture produced in the United States circulates in Cuba through a phenomenon called el paquete semanal (the weekly package). El paquete refers to the sale and circulation of media content primarily produced off the island, mainly from the United States. In addition to keeping up with popular American sitcoms and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, television produced by Cubans in South Florida is also immensely popular. People on the island can now watch Cuban artists who have permanently left the island perform nightly on South Florida television. The ubiquitous presence of el paquete and popular culture produced in the United States more broadly across the island are important sites for understanding the social and economic changes occurring in Cuba under Raúl Castro. Looking at the movement of popular culture between the island and the diaspora will also allow me to highlight how intensifying transnational contact, continuity, and exchange are affecting and reflecting the lives of Cubans on and off the island, culturally and economically.
The fifth and final chapter, “Digital Diversión,” moves away from examining geographic locales to consider the rising importance of digital spaces in mediating diasporic identities. In this chapter, I seek to trace how cubanía echoes online through close readings of popular, highly circulated forms of diversión such as parody videos and memes. If Web 2.0 is primarily about sharing content, examining widely circulated forms of diversión online is a powerful means for understanding how and why certain narratives of cubanía resonate. Analysis of this content, in turn, illuminates how the circulation, consumption, and experience of diversión online encourages a ludic sociability that helps to structure one’s engagement with the world online and off. A wide view of this content online also reveals generational tensions and the continued role of race in the mediation of Cuban American whiteness. To do this work, I will closely examine the material of a puppet named Pepe Billete and of Los Pichy Boys—two acts whose material has been viewed millions of times through various social media channels.
Diversión is what we share—the pleasures we experience together as we make our way through the world. It is a world filled with fleeting, ludic moments that are too often passed over or forgotten when the next tragedy strikes. By lingering in these moments, these chapters bring together an archive of popular pleasures over time that tell a story about changes within the Cuban diaspora and the practices and experiences that produce narratives of self and community. At its core, this book seeks to inspire what I experienced when I first listened to all those Alvarez Guedes albums for the first time: a sense of critical possibility, complexity, and yes, even a laugh.
1
Un Tipo Típico
Alvarez Guedes Takes the Stage
I don’t remember when I heard my first joke by Cuban exile comedian Guillermo Alvarez Guedes. His comedy has always been in my life, hiding in plain sight. I came to this realization early on in graduate school when I sat down to write a seminar paper on exile humor and decided to listen to all of his albums. It was then that I realized that my father, one of the funniest people I know, had been cracking Alvarez Guedes’s jokes for years without much in the way of citation—a practice his son will not duplicate in the chapters to come. I didn’t grow up with Alvarez Guedes albums in my house. They didn’t play in the background of family parties, or on long car rides as so many others have told me anecdotally. His radio show in Miami didn’t reach my home in New Jersey. Yet there he was the whole time, appearing in the joke repertoire of family and friends.
As I show in the introduction, there are many examples of diversión from those early years of the Cuban exile community that I could have addressed in this first chapter: the lively theater scene, tabloid satirical newspapers like Zig-Zag Libre and Chispa, or folkloric events like Añorada Cuba. But Alvarez Guedes is truly the only way a book focused on ludic popular culture in the Cuban diaspora can start. What made him so unique was his durability and popularity across multiple generations of the diaspora over a career that spanned over half a century. Best known for his standup comedy, Alvarez Guedes released thirty-two live albums from the 1970s through the early 2000s. These recordings continue to serve as Cuban social and cultural capital. How many times have I heard someone say, “That reminds me of an Alvarez Guedes joke” and then break out into his or her best rendition? The embeddedness of his jokes is so pronounced that I have even heard people use snippets of his material like “tú eres como el tipo del gato” as a kind of metaphoric shorthand to describe a person or situation—in this case a pessimist.1 This popularity extends beyond his rank and file audience to other professional comedians on and off the island. Every single artist I write about in this book cites him as a vital influence. Starting with Alvarez Guedes, then, also provides a useful point of departure for thinking through genealogies of diversión in the Cuban diaspora.
Though his influence reverberates across generations, this chapter takes a much more focused approach through an examination of his comedy in the 1970s and 1980s. Even then, in those early years of his career in exile, Alvarez Guedes was looked upon as a kind of model exile subject. His standing among the community is best summed up in an article written by Cristina Saralegui for El Miami Herald in 1976, years before she built her talk-show empire: “Ahora, Guillermo Alvarez Guedes es EL TIPICO CUBANO EXILIADO (Now, Guillermo Alvarez Guedes is THE TYPICAL CUBAN EXILE).2 Alvarez Guedes’s status as un tipo típico—a Cuban everyman—is partially due to his politics, which were in many ways in tune with what Lisandro Pérez has called the “exile ideology.” Its characteristics include continuing to attach importance to politics in Cuba; hostility against the Cuban government; conservative, Republican political views; and general intolerance for those whose perspectives on Cuba differ.3 Informing what it meant to be Cuban off the island, this ideology manifested itself in a “behavioral repertoire … ranging from supporting right-wing candidates to opposing publicly anyone voicing sympathy for the Cuban regime.”4 Not content to limit his anti-communist humor to Miami, Alvarez Guedes travelled to Nicaragua to perform a set for the Contras in 1986.5
These politics informed Alvarez Guedes’s larger performance of exile cubanía—a Cuban cultural identity inflected with the politics of the exile ideology. But that was not enough to make him un tipo típico. More importantly, Alvarez Guedes reflected back what his audience wanted to see in itself: a wise-cracking anti-communist with a magnetic affability who could take the turbulence of exile politics and life in Miami and use it as fodder for diversión. Perhaps more than any other Cuban exile artist, Alvarez Guedes insisted upon a ludic sociability that cohered around a narrative of proud, pleasurable exile cubanía mediated through his humor. My research has yet to turn up a negative review of his work. In fact, I argue that people wanted to like
