The Transnational Life of Diversión

This chapter investigates the flows of ludic popular culture between Cuba and the United States in order to elaborate its central contention: the movement of popular culture is indicative of the intensification of transnational contact born out of political and demographic changes on both sides and is a means by which this intensification occurs. The first part focuses on standup comedy by island-based comedians who appeal to Cubans who have arrived in Miami since 1994 and the racialized and gendered underpinnings of their acts. The second half explores how popular culture produced in the United States circulates in Cuba through a phenomenon called el paquete semanal (the weekly package). El paqueterefers to the sale and circulation of media content primarily produced off the island, mainly from the United States. In addition to keeping up with American sitcoms and Hollywood blockbusters, people on the island can now watch artists who have left Cuba permanently perform nightly on South Florida television. Analyzing the movement of popular culture between the island and the diaspora highlights how intensifying transnational contact, continuity, and exchange are affecting and reflecting the lives of Cubans on and off the island culturally and economically.

Nostalgic Pleasures

This chapter takes up a concept that has achieved a kind of keyword status in Cuban American Studies: nostalgia. The chapter tracks nostalgia not as an ambivalent sentiment but as a public form of diversión, paying special attention to a festival held annually since 1999 in Miami called Cuba Nostalgia. Since 1999, Cuba Nostalgia has celebrated pre-Castro Cuba through a combination of spectacle and consumption. Musical genres popular before the Revolution play while businesses dedicated to selling Cuban memorabilia dot the fairgrounds. With the demographics of Cuban Miami rapidly shifting, Cuba Nostalgia offers 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, this chapter theorizes 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.

Cuban Miami on the Air

In this chapter, the book moves into the twenty-first century to examine a changing Cuban Miami where the majority is made up of US-born generations and more recent arrivals since 1994. It historicizes the prominent role of radio in Cuban Miami—specifically the conservative genre of exile talk radio—and then considers comedy bits performed on the Enrique y Joe Show and The Enrique Santos Show. These radio programs sat at the top of Miami’s charts throughout the 2000s. Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero, both US-born Cuban Americans, proudly performed the narrative of cubanía learned from the exile generation through use of idiomatic expressions, accents, and their famous prank call to Fidel Castro. But their pranks also marked a shift in the handling of Cuba-related topics on the air, articulating a much less conservative approach and demonstrating that a Cuban diasporic identity need not be tethered to a particular political ideology. Contextualizing these performances in relation to their audience of US-born Cuban Americans, more recent arrivals from the island, and the corporate investment of Univision in the Miami radio market provides a means to understand Cuban Miami’s shifting demographics and media landscape in the 2000s.

Un Tipo Típico

This chapter examines the career of Cuban exile comedian Guillermo Alvarez Guedes. Through close analysis of his standup albums, this chapter uses his comedy to understand the centrality of the ludic at a moment in the history of the Cuban exile community rarely discussed in playful terms: the late 1970s and 1980s. The Mariel boat crisis, domestic terrorism against alleged Castro sympathizers, and the drug trade in Miami created strife within the community and turned the tide of public opinion against Cuban Americans. The chapter argues that Alvarez Guedes’s popular comic performances helped to consolidate a Cuban exile identity premised on whiteness and heteronormativity while simultaneously pushing back against discrimination against Cubans from Anglo Miamians.

Introduction

The introduction sets up two of the book’s primary objectives. First, it establishes the concept of diversión as a necessary affective complement to Cuban American Studies and Latina/o Studies more broadly in its emphasis on the vital role of laughter and play in quotidian life. Diversión is both a popular culture form and a means to describe its enactment—the performative repertoire of cubanía captured in gesticulation, word choice, tone, and speech patterns. Instead of focusing solely on the pain, anger, and sadness usually used to describe the Cuban diaspora in the United States, the introduction lays out the critical possibilities in ludic popular culture forms like standup comedy, festivals, television, and social media. Also included is a discussion of how diversión can be a means to reify and challenge normative discourse around race and sexuality. Second, it details how the Cuban diaspora has undergone massive demographic, political, and generational shifts since the 1990s and how the concept of diversión is especially useful for understanding these changes. Though the book focuses primarily on the twenty-first century, the introduction details an extensive archive of Cuban diasporic diversión extending back to the late nineteenth century.

Digital Diversión

This chapter moves away from specific geographic locales to consider the rising importance of digital spaces in mediating diasporic identities. It traces 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, analyzing widely circulated forms of diversión online is a powerful means for understanding how and why certain narratives of cubanía resonate. Investigating 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, the chapter examines the material of a puppet named Pepe Billete and a duo called Los Pichy Boys, both viewed millions of times through various social media channels.