He follows this up by imagining situations in which an americano would have to defend him or herself from Cubans. Every example describes the americano as being on the outside looking in and incapable of understanding when Cubans are talking badly about him or her. Choteo has changed the stakes of the game through a clear inversion of power relations. Cuban culture on this album becomes center while the non-Spanish speaking americanos are marginalized by their inability to understand what has been classified as “foreign” for so long.
This positing of Cuban culture as moving from minor to major indicates a shift in how “defense” has evolved in Alvarez Guedes’s repertoire. In the first Cuban language class, “defender” was invoked to describe one’s ability to at least “get by” in English. The covert aggression of this first class used choteo to “level” the linguistic power relations in Miami by creating an imagined scenario wherein Spanish was an important, equal part of the “bi” in “bilingual” city. As the political situation in Miami became more intense with the Mariel crisis and the anti-bilingual referendum, “defense” took on a more military connotation—defense as offense. These narratives stress how the Cuban and Latin American presence is a powerful force politically and economically by pointing out the pervasiveness of Spanish throughout the city. Alvarez Guedes goes on the attack on these albums, using choteo to speak out against the Anglo establishment, the example of Mañach’s “inflexible authority” attempting to discredit the community. On How to Defend Yourself from the Cubans, the Cuban community, and by extension, Spanish, is positioned as dominant. In these narratives, the burden of defense is now upon los americanos in a Miami where Cuban culture has become the center and English is becoming more and more marginal.
Adding to the comic effect of this album is Alvarez Guedes’s articulation of Spanish. When he uses Spanish, it is only to “teach” his “American audience” how to use certain vulgar words to defend themselves from Cubans in the situations mentioned above. But when he does explain how to fire back against these Cubans, his Spanish is inflected with an English accent. He mispronounces words, puts the accent on the wrong syllable, and generally sounds like the stereotypical gringo attempting to roll a pair of “Rs” with little success. In contrast to the gringo-inflected Spanish, Alvarez Guedes’s speech reflects a relative mastery of English. To perform in English to an audience that understands the jokes as they shift from English to Spanish is to enact the community’s attempt at mastering the codes of the dominant culture while simultaneously retaining culturally specific forms like the Spanish language and choteo as powerful, pleasurable ways of narrating experience.
Although the performance is all about displacing the need for defense onto los americanos of Miami, teaching an “American audience” how to defend themselves against the linguistic threat of Cuban Spanish is, once again, a form of defense for a community at a particularly hostile moment in time. National poll results after the Mariel crisis showed the country’s extremely low opinion of the Cuban community in the United States.67 The repeal of bilingualism laws, together with the negative views of the Cuban community, created a need to perform a certain brand of cultural solidarity and even superiority. How to Defend Yourself from the Cubans is one example. It performs cultural nationalism in English with a heightened sensitivity to the play between American and Cuban culture. The performance on this album demonstrates that despite learning English and assimilating in some respects, exile culture is still dominated by cubanía. By performing his mastery of English and simultaneously invoking the familiar language and codes of choteo, Alvarez Guedes makes a defiant statement against American assimilation models and stresses the vitality of the exile community.
Alvarez Guedes’s choteo and unmistakable popularity provide a means for understanding the ways in which the exile community narrated itself for itself during the tumultuous 1970s and 1980s. In a time of domestic terrorism in the form of bombings and threats, generational shifts, political infighting within the community, and the most intense anti-Castro sentiment, diversión played an instrumental role in establishing the “common ground” of exile cubanía. Alvarez Guedes’s material in the 1970s and 1980s reveals the utility of popular culture for “analyzing the consciousness of the past.”68 His performances and his widespread appeal reveal how the community made sense of its place in Miami’s social hierarchy through a ludic discourse that combined the racial and normative sexual ideologies of Cuba and the United States to inform a narrative of exile cubanía. The history of choteo and its racial and sexual preoccupations on the island aligned with social hierarchies and discriminatory rhetoric in the United States and provided a convenient transnational continuity for exiles getting their bearings. When Anglos in Miami attempted to enclose the exile community in the realm of “otherness” and its attendant disenfranchisement, the community answered with a brash assertion of a Cuban cultural identity that simultaneously insisted on the privileges inherent in whiteness and heteronormativity. This manifested itself in popular culture and as the 1980s progressed, increased visibility and power in local and then national governments. Alvarez Guedes’s vision for the “perfect” Miami where Cubans dominated was not far off.
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One of my favorite possessions is a 1983 talking Alvarez Guedes doll. He hangs out in my office, and students and colleagues alike get a kick out of pressing his stomach and hearing him belt out foul-mouthed phrases like “¡Ño! ¡Desde que llegaste lo único que haces es hablar mierda!” (Damn! Since you got here all you do is talk shit/nonsense!). Here, he is surrounded by the many books that have helped me theorize his comedy. But perhaps no study has been more crucial in that regard than José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Through a reading of queer performance artist Carmelita Tropicana, Muñoz explains how choteo has “disidentificatory potential” in the way it can “mediate between a space of identification with and total disavowal of the dominant culture’s normative identificatory nodes.”69 Alvarez Guedes jokes don’t always make me laugh, and much of his material on race and sexuality puts him at odds with my politics. But the way he tells all his jokes, the way he mobilizes choteo through language, tone, timing, and delivery, have always been a source of pleasure and an influence on my own “performance” as a public speaker. As Carmelita Tropicana and Muñoz show us, these things do not have to be at odds. It is possible to disidentify with exile cubanía, “not rejecting it and not embracing it without reservations,” in order to produce alternative visions of cubanía, community, and the world.70 I explore this potential in more detail in the next chapter with the work of two US-born Cuban Americans who mobilize choteo to both identify with their parents’ generation and criticize the political orthodoxy of exile cubanía.
2
Cuban Miami on the Air
But radio in Miami will continue to be, without a doubt, its most faithful reflection and even if it’s shouted or preached, applauded to insanity or thrashed verbally in opposition, one must recognize its unique and predominant role, the mirror that reflects us, the exponent of our idiosyncrasy. It is clever, controversial and vigorous radio just like the Cuba that witnessed our birth and it’s reborn here now.
—Heberto Padilla, El Miami Herald, 1986
Famed Cuban poet Heberto Padilla’s praise for radio in the pages of El Miami Herald not only highlights its powerful role in the city’s media landscape in the 1980s but also gestures toward radio’s significant place in Cuban culture historically.1 Since the first radio broadcast in Havana in 1922, radio has played a prominent role in Cuban cultural life on and off the island.2 When Cubans began leaving for the United States after the Revolution, they brought their love of radio with them. Those well versed in Cuba’s radio industry were able to redeploy their talent and skills in the exile context. The result was the beginning of a vibrant radio culture in Miami, which continues today. Currently, Miami is the third largest Latino/a radio market in the United States—a statistic powered in large part by the city’s Cuban population. But does radio continue to provide a “faithful reflection” of the Cuban community, as Padilla suggests? Has it ever? How can listening to radio