Radio’s popularity across decades and generational cohorts makes it a particularly productive site for understanding shifts within Cuban Miami over time. Historically, radio has been the most effective means for communicating the exile ideology through a consistent message of anti-Castro politics and condemnation of those seen as sympathetic to the Cuban government. But with generational turnover and increasingly moderate stances on Cuba by more recent arrivals and US-born Cuban Americans, the narrative of cubanía on the radio shifted to stay relevant and profitable in the 2000s. It is in the beginning of the twenty-first century that popular culture in Cuban Miami begins to tilt markedly away from the preoccupations of the older exile community to serve the needs and interests of younger generations.
This chapter privileges the generational position of US-born Cuban Americans through an analysis of immensely popular morning radio programs that aired throughout the 2000s called the Enrique y Joe Show and the Enrique Santos Show. Hosted by Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero, the children of Cuban exiles raised in the United States, the shows targeted a younger, Spanish-speaking audience on stations that played contemporary salsa, merengue, and reggaeton. But music was never their primary draw. Audiences tuned in for the diversión that framed their daily performances. Santos and Ferrero combined elements of English-language “morning zoo” radio shows such as prank calls, musical parodies, interviews, and the like with a deeply Cuban performance practice. Their word choice, slang, and accents reflected the vernacular of Cuban Miami. In addition, their enactment of diversión through the recognizable irreverence of choteo signaled a particular way of joking that was legible to their audiences. Familiar comic tropes, Cuban wordplay and puns, and vocal cues created a sense of intimacy with their audience and served as a kind of invitation to join in the jodedera every morning. This mix of Cuban and mainstream US cultural elements reflects not only the generational position of Santos and Ferrero but also the flexibility of diversión to address the needs of a changing present.
Unsurprisingly, the performative repertoire of diversión employed for these radio shows shares many similarities with the standup of Alvarez Guedes discussed in Chapter 1. Santos and Ferrero learned what it meant to enact cubanía from the older generation the comedian represents. But their performances are not carbon copies of material from the 1970s. As in the previous chapter, here I will employ a practice of close listening in order to get at the complex generational dynamics at play in Cuban Miami in the 2000s. This approach reveals the role of diversión as a disidentificatory practice that allows Santos and Ferrero to revel in aspects of exile cubanía while simultaneously framing the perceived limits of the politics encoded therein. Further complicating this investigation of narratives of cubanía on the air will be my analysis of the role of multimedia conglomerates like Univision in determining which voices and narratives the public hears in the first place.
Radio and Politics in Cuban Miami
From its early beginnings in Miami, radio by and for Cubans has had a political slant regardless of whether the broadcasts were directed toward the island or those living stateside. Radio transmitted from Miami to Cuba has been at the forefront of attempts to destabilize the Cuban government. Radio Swan, widely believed to be financed by the CIA, became active in 1960 and transmitted anti-Castro political viewpoints into the island. During the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Radio Swan broadcasts served as a “call to arms” for Cubans to rise up and rebel.3 Exile groups with their own radio equipment complemented this covert, government-sponsored radio offensive by taking advantage of the short distance between South Florida and Cuba to transmit their own messages over the ether.4 The Cuban government retaliated with its own political propaganda over the airwaves and by attempting to jam, with some success, transmissions to the island.5
In 1983, a lobbying push from the Cuban American National Foundation led by Jorge Mas Canosa, the radio offensive against Cuba received public government backing with the Reagan administration’s support of Radio Martí. Still active with the help of government funding, Radio Martí has a mission to provide “objective” news and information to Cubans on the island with the hopes of promoting “the cause of freedom” in Cuba.6 Over the years, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting has been criticized for mismanagement and an inability to live up to its stated goals. A 2010 report to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the US Senate cites poor journalism, a small audience on the island, Cuban signal jamming, and corruption within the Office of Cuba Broadcasting for its failures. With diplomatic relations between Washington and Havana restored, the future of the station is uncertain.
At the same time that broadcasts were being transmitted to Cuba, radio was thriving in Miami. For members of the exile generation arriving in the 1960s and 1970s, radio quickly became “the medium of choice” for news and entertainment.7 Established by station owners, staff, and on-air talent who fled soon after the Revolution, radio stations and programming took on a distinctively Cuban flair. Stations modeled themselves on the radio culture in Cuba before the Revolution in order to attract audiences with programming that sounded familiar. As the Cuban population in Miami exploded in the second half of the twentieth century, so did the number of Spanish-language media outlets catering to their needs. The number of newspapers, television, and radio stations steadily increased, and by the late 1980s, there were eight Spanish-language radio stations serving the greater Miami area.8
In those early years of exile, radio programs sought to demystify life in the United States by explaining new laws and customs. Stations paired discussions of quotidian concerns with a healthy dose of political commentary in ways that proved instrumental in consolidating the political and affective coordinates of exile cubanía. As María Cristina García explains, “Cuban radio reflected the more conservative views of the community. Editorials were staunchly anti-Castro and anti-communist, opposing a political rapprochement with Cuba and the lifting of the US trade embargo, and supporting émigrés’ paramilitary campaigns against the Cuban government.”9 As a mode of communication, radio creates a sense of community, “a strong collective sensibility,” strengthened further by a shared set of circumstances.10 These circumstances—exilic displacement and the existence of a common enemy embodied in the person of Fidel Castro—have been mobilized in media serving Cuban Miami over time to strengthen the notion of a community unified in politics and feeling.
Despite the sense of a unified community relayed on the air, radio in Miami has been a contested site for the dissemination of opinions related to Cuba and local concerns. Proponents of the exile ideology used broadcasts to slam dialogueros—those willing to open communication with Cuba—as communists and agents of the Castro government. Attacks in the media were supplemented by physical violence, as María de los Angeles Torres explains: “Terrorism as a form of activism became ingrained in the political life of the exile community. Having gained control of the Miami media, many businesses, and the electoral arena, hard-line exile forces sought to impose a single, rigid anti-Castro viewpoint, using intimidation and violence to silence their opponents.”11 Radio personalities who condemned this violence became targets as well. In 1976, a car bomb maimed Emilio Milián, a broadcaster who criticized violence committed in the name of Cuba.
In the early 1990s, those sympathetic to engagement with Cuba through dialogue saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the disastrous effects it had on the Cuban economy as an opportunity for change on the island.12 Once again, radio served as a bully pulpit rallying listeners against dialogue “almost round the clock” at a moment when many believed Castro was most vulnerable.13 With this sentiment in the air, supporters of the exile ideology successfully lobbied Congress to tighten the embargo, and in 1992 the Cuban Democracy Act (also known as the Torricelli Act) passed. Congress intensified sanctions again in 1996, when President Bill Clinton signed the Helms-Burton Act into law.14 In 2000, Miami gained international notoriety for the Elián González saga and the heavily contested Bush-Gore presidential election. The scholarship of Susan Eckstein and Isabel Molina Guzmán reveals that Miami’s Spanish-language media largely supported the family’s asylum claim on Elián’s behalf.15
But as this book repeatedly asserts, it was never all doom and gloom, fire and brimstone on the Miami airwaves. Guillermo Alvarez Guedes enjoyed a long radio career. Old episodes of La tremenda corte (The Outrageous Court)