While discrimination experienced on the ground complicated this narrative of whiteness and privilege, there was little interest in identifying as an oppressed minority.18 Instead, Cuban exiles drew from a long history of racist and homophobic humor from the island to assist in the crafting of a communal narrative about the place of the exile community in the social hierarchy of South Florida. In the case of Alvarez Guedes, jokes about blacks and locas (gay men) can be found throughout his albums but are most prevalent in material from the tumultuous 1970s and early 1980s—decades marked by racial uprisings and legislation that discriminated against Cubans and Dade County’s gay population. These jokes and performances capture the role diversión played in solidifying and patrolling the boundaries of a white, heteronormative, politically enfranchised exile identity while simultaneously demonstrating the transnational melding of Cuban and US racial and sexual ideologies.
It is not surprising that race-based humor has long existed on an island where histories of slavery, colonialism, and capital have always intersected. What is so fascinating is the way in which the themes and ideological preoccupations encoded within Cuban race-based humor reappear in the popular culture of the post-1959 exile community. In her study of blackface performance in nineteenth-century Cuba, Jill Lane explains the ideological projects of teatro bufo performances: “This blackface humor works discursively at two levels: it controls and limits the otherwise menacing significance of blackness at the same time that it renegotiates the meanings of whiteness in a colonial hierarchy that privileged Spanish peninsulares (literally, ‘peninsulars,’ those born on the Iberian peninsula) over white criollos.”19 Though historical circumstances in colonial Cuba and Miami in the 1970s were of course markedly different, Lane’s description of how blackness operated discursively within the context of bufo is relevant here. Like nineteenth-century bufo, Alvarez Guedes’s race-based material functioned as a means to negotiate Cuban whiteness and its relationship to blackness. I read his jokes as part of an ongoing project for negotiating Cuban whiteness in the context of US racial politics at a time of great anxiety about blackness in Miami and a moment when Cuban racial self-definitions were under fire from Anglos wary of the Cuban influx into South Florida.
The first joke I consider, from Alvarez Guedes 2 released in 1974, speaks to the kind of humor inspired by racial politics in the United States:
A black guy commits a traffic violation in Alabama and they condemn him to die in the arena with the lions. He only ran a red light but they condemned him to die with the lions. They take him to a stadium and they bury him in sand up to his neck. Twenty thousand blond, green-eyed spectators fill the stands. They release the lion and it quickly attacks the black guy who can’t defend himself because his head is the only part of his body above the sand. But when the lion gets close enough, the black guy bites the lion’s leg. The twenty thousand spectators stand up and scream: “PELEA LIMPIO NEGRO HIJO DE PUTA!” (FIGHT FAIR YOU BLACK SON OF A BITCH!)20
In this joke, Alvarez Guedes positions the audience to see the racial drama of the United States from an outsider perspective with Alabama as the symbolic site. And it is not the only joke where he does this. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he sets three more jokes, in addition to his other race-related jokes, in Alabama. As in Cuba, racism against blacks is fodder for humor. In this particular joke, the black man is the silent victim whose last-ditch effort at resistance is read as consistent with stereotypical understandings of uncivilized blackness. The fifteen seconds of uninterrupted laughter following the delivery of the punchline signal the audience’s enjoyment and alignment with a comic perspective that routinely uses racist violence as a means to entertain.
Jokes about blacks in the United States would be familiar to a Cuban audience well-versed in race-based humor from the island. But there is more to these jokes. When I began to listen Alvarez Guedes’s race-based humor on its own, I could not shake the sense that they sounded familiar, American even. I began to search the “dirty jokes books” that became so popular in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. And then I found it. A version of the Alabama joke above can be found in Larry Wilde’s 1975 The Official White Folks/Black Folks Joke Book.21 I have also found two other jokes from Alvarez Guedes’s albums that correspond with material in Blanche Knott’s best-selling Truly Tasteless Jokes series.22 In every case, Alvarez Guedes performed the joke before the publication date in the above-mentioned books. But these joke books include little original material. Instead, authors compiled jokes that they had heard independently or, as in the case of Blanche Knott, that were sent to her after she put out an open call for material in Truly Tasteless Jokes Two.23 My sense is that it is quite unlikely that Alvarez Guedes was sending his original jokes for consideration in these books. Completely fluent in English, the comedian was likely adapting jokes he had heard or read for his routine—a practice he would freely admit to.24
These joke books were equal opportunity offenders. Larry Wilde, who has penned dozens of these joke books, has dedicated collections to specific races and ethnicities.25 The formula in the Truly Tasteless series was to include jokes on a host of different groups in each installment including: Black, Jewish, Polish, WASP, Handicapped, Homosexual, Dead Baby, and for those who like a mix of ethnicities in their jokes, a section called “Ethnic Jokes, Variegated,” among others. Tellingly, Alvarez Guedes never included a Polish or Italian joke on his albums.26 Such jokes would have been foreign in the context of Cuban Miami. Jokes about blacks would be familiar from Cuba and thus enjoyable for his audience in a way jokes about other ethnicities would not have been. Through humor, Alvarez Guedes and his audience could align themselves with the white racial gaze of the United States through a detour into the race-based humor of American popular culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
Is it possible to read the Alabama joke more generously? To give it the benefit of the doubt as an indictment of the violence inflicted upon black bodies in the United States? While it is important to leave that possibility open, historical context makes such a reading less convincing. Alvarez Guedes invites white Cubans to laugh at the racial politics of the United States at a moment when anxiety about blacks in Miami was high. Bruce Porter and Marvin Dunn detail what they call thirteen separate racially charged “miniriots” in 1970s Dade County—violence that reached a climax with the uprising of 1980, sparked by the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating death of a black man named Arthur McDuffie.27 These uprisings were rooted in the long history of discrimination, unequal power relations, and segregation in Miami and would have been visible to the growing Cuban community. The vast majority of Cubans in Miami at the time this joke was performed in 1975 identified as white and had little interest in casting their lot with the black communities of South Florida and the challenges they faced. Blacks in Miami quickly found cause for resenting the Cuban community. They watched as white Cubans began competing with them in the labor market. The generous benefits and programs instituted to assist Cubans fleeing communism added to this ill will.28 While the black community took up the Cuban question frequently, Guillermo Grenier and Max Castro show that the Spanish-language press did not reciprocate this attention. Instead, negative attitudes toward blacks in Miami manifested themselves in more specialized and ephemeral media channels like radio, tabloid newspapers, and of course, jokes.29
In one such example on Alvarez Guedes 16