The police arrive to raid una fiesta de locas and they surround their house with police cars and a patrol wagon. When they have the house completely surrounded, una loca comes out of the house like a shot running [makes cartoonish running sound] and bam! gets into the wagon. The cop asks, “Why did you come out alone and get into the wagon by yourself?” To which la loca replies [effeminate voice], “Porque el año pasado me tocó ir de pie” (Because last year I had to go [to the police station] by foot!)44
The setting of the joke betrays its historical context. With police roundups of gay men in Miami in the news, Alvarez Guedes signals a situation that would be familiar to his audience. The comedian even uses the word “raid” in English suggesting that this term would be understood by his predominantly Spanish-speaking audience. With state-sponsored violence not being funny in and of itself, the comic pleasure hinges on the cartoonish depiction of la loca. Alvarez Guedes produces this caricature by manipulating his voice to resemble the sound effect of a cartoon character running quickly (think Bugs Bunny) complete with the “bam!” when la loca gets into the police wagon. The next comic layer comes when the joke moves to unsettle the expectations of the audience: Why would the “guilty” loca willingly get into the police wagon? Alvarez Guedes supplies the answer by adopting an effeminate voice and lilt that his audience would immediately recognize. The punchline builds off of the cartoonish representation up to that point. This is not la loca’s first run-in with the law. La loca simply can’t help being loca. Flamboyance (conveyed in Alvarez Guedes’s loca ventriloquism) and the repetition of the “illegal” behavior of attending a party with other locas suggest that the desire for pleasure and the company of men trumps the unpleasure of yet another visit to jail. This loca does not resist state violence; it is the accepted cost of effeminate, same-sex desire. In this narrative, la loca is asking for it.
If this joke were made by a Cuban drag queen or queer performance artist, it might be possible to read it as resistance to the criminalization of queer sexualities in the United States.45 But alas, this is not the performer or the audience. Instead, this joke and others are in keeping with how queerness has traditionally entered and been consumed in popular culture on and off the island—as a kind of abstract entertainment, pure surface, and a convenient source for a quick laugh.46 This kind of humor is so ingrained that it is possible to discern laughter from the audience on the album even before the punchline is delivered. The mere mention of “una fiesta de locas” was enough for some members of the audience. This abject image of la loca, legible only through sexuality deemed aberrant and thus comical in its incongruousness, was and continues to be a regular feature of Cuban humor on and off the stage. It is a critical thread that I will examine throughout the book.
Problems arise when la loca ceases to exist only for entertainment and becomes “real,” a political subject who demands rights and fair treatment and actively campaigns against state-sponsored violence. As with jokes about race, jokes about sexuality can be read in the context of the Cuban community forging a normative narrative of exile cubanía. In January of 1977 a group of gay activists organized under the banner of the Dade County Coalition for the Humanistic Rights of Gays to lobby for a change in the county’s human rights statute that would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual preference. Though the amendment passed, it quickly drew the ire of conservative groups in South Florida. Anita Bryant became the face of the backlash leading an organization called Save Our Children, Inc., created to rally support for the effort to repeal the anti-discrimination amendment.47 In a shrewd political move, Bryant and Save Our Children made an aggressive push to enlist the support of South Florida’s growing Cuban community. All accounts point to Cubans as strong supporters of Bryant’s efforts.48 In June of 1977, the anti-discrimination amendment was repealed in a landslide referendum.
There is little doubt that the rhetoric of Save Our Children, communicated in the organization’s very title, would strike a chord in the exile community. Many were concerned in the 1960s and 1970s about the Americanization of their children and their exposure to counterculture movements dedicated to questioning the racial, gender, and sexual dynamics of US society.49 By invoking “the children,” Bryant and her organization hit a nerve. The mobilization of the Cuban vote against this issue would serve as an example of what was possible when the community voted as a bloc—a prelude perhaps to the Cuban political dominance of South Florida that would begin to develop in earnest in the 1980s.50 Only seven years after Cubans in Miami rallied behind the Bryant initiative to repeal the anti-discrimination act, they stood up and applauded Improper Conduct for its condemnation of the Cuban government’s treatment of sexual minorities.
There are perhaps less obvious reasons for this preoccupation with sexuality and masculinity. The hypermasculine posturing of the exile community and its resistance to a gay rights agenda can be read partially as a response to a certain crisis of masculinity stirred by the profound impotence felt as a consequence of the consistent failure to effect political change in Cuba. The terrible rout of CIA-trained Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs Invasion is the most visible example of this impotence. But in truth, Fidel Castro’s vitality and carefully curated masculine image—his green fatigues signaling readiness for battle—served as a constant reminder in those early years to the exile community of who “the real man” was. The need to constantly assert a strong, masculine presence was thus extremely important to the exile community, as was displacement of that failed masculinity. Satirical Cuban exile tabloid periodicals often represented Fidel Castro as a woman in the service of amorous Russians.51 Raúl Castro, followed by rumors of closeted homosexuality since the early years of the Revolution, is consistently represented as una loca in political cartooning even today. It is telling that the government official most often imagined as una loca is the official with the most symbolically “masculine” post as head of the Cuban Armed Forces. Choteo becomes a way to displace failed masculinity onto the communists while consolidating its antithesis in exile—a white, potent masculinity emphasized in popular culture and politics.
Like his jokes about race, Alvarez Guedes’s material about sexuality is a meaningful site to pause and consider the ways in which Cubans combined and reconciled social codes and attitudes on the island with those of the United States. Choteo’s long history as a popular and quotidian strategy for narrating Cuban national identity and its racial and sexual preoccupations surfaces in the exile context to do similar work. But as I explain in the next section, the articulation of exile cubanía with a claim on the privileges of normative whiteness in the United States did meet resistance from Anglo Miami.
Cubano-Americano Tensions
Alvarez Guedes’s comedy was not just a means to claim an abstract, privileged whiteness. Instead, exiles were invested in a distinctly Cuban whiteness that also resisted Anglo assimilationist paradigms. Built into the rhetoric of exile is the notion of forced departure and the fantasy of return. These two elements of the exile narrative strongly informed the desire to maintain Cuban cultural characteristics and the performances of cultural nationalism that permeate Alvarez Guedes’s comedy. Unsurprisingly, this led to tensions between exiles and the Anglo majority throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Miami. It is out of these tensions that one of Alvarez Guedes’s most popular and recurring targets for the anti-authoritarianism of choteo surfaces, “los americanos.”
Exiles arriving in the first two waves of migration during 1959–1974 enjoyed a warm welcome from the US government. Aside from hoping that the physical movement of so many Cubans would destabilize Castro’s new government, the United States held up the example of the exodus as proof of the evils and failures of communism. This helped to supplement the aggressive, anti-communist propaganda effort in the Americas during the Cold War. To drive the point home, Cuban success in the United States would prove that the American capitalist system was superior to communism. For these and other politically expedient reasons, Cubans