But of course, as Hall reminds us, the world is rarely so neat. It would be reductive to characterize Cuban popular culture and its consumption as an orderly two-way street to explain the intersection of popular culture, privilege, and power. Popular culture must, as Richard Iton explains, “be understood as a result of the creative process and its embedded intentions; the potentially quite distinct and even contrasting—but equally creative—use made of them by others; and the feedback mechanisms and interpolative possibilities linking these various stages.”59 Heeding Iton, I make space for the difficult, fraught relationships one can have with dominant narratives of Cuban American identity, especially in relation to race and politics. This ambivalence manifests itself most clearly along generational lines when US-born Cuban Americans, for instance, may revel in the performative aspects of diversión but may not subscribe to conservative politics and racist representations when they do arise. Can one enjoy the way a joke is told—the cadence, the words used, the accent, the style of it all—and still feel ill at ease with the punchline? We can laugh, but it does not always mean it feels good. This is the routine dissonance that often frames cultural consumption in quotidian life. These moments can reveal the disidentificatory potential of diversión, the potential for “identification with and total disavowal of the dominant culture’s normative identificatory nodes.”60 This disidentificatory mode can have real effects, acting as a means to levy critique and enact a cubanía at odds with the troublesome representations that can creep up in popular culture.
Popular culture can offer communities a mechanism for self-critique without challenging the desire for group cohesion. Here, we once again see the contradictions of popular culture—its potential for reifying and challenging dominant narratives, at times simultaneously. These are the contradictions this book will live in. Engaging moments that can make us uncomfortable but nonetheless offer pleasures lays bare the complexity of our feelings and attachments within an area of cultural experience so often seen as overdetermined, “good” or “bad”—the popular. A comer arroz con mango.
Examining the relationship between race and diversión provides a means for understanding how Cubans in the diaspora have imagined themselves in the United States and how that imaginary has had both sustained and integral effects on social relations in South Florida. But this study also seeks to make an intervention in studies of race, sexuality, and ethnicity in the United States more broadly by “diverting” attention away from cultural forms that privilege the pain, anger, and disappointment in the lives of ethnic-racialized subjects. To be sure, scholars in fields like Queer Studies, Native American Studies, and African American Studies in particular have pointed to this imbalance and have shown what analysis of ludic forms can teach us. Sara Warner argues that her focus on “gaiety” in LGBT performance “serves as a rejoinder to the long-lasting romance with mourning and melancholia in queer theory.”61 Glenda Carpio explains that “African American humor has been an underestimated realm of analysis” in her book on black humor in relation to the legacy of slavery.62 Yet the question remains: Why has so little been published?
The answer lies, in part, in the history of these fields. Race and ethnic studies in the United States as we know them were made possible by the rise of protest movements. Institutional recognition has always been a fight, and maintaining that tenuous foothold in the university has been a constant challenge. This has no doubt affected the direction of scholarship. Focusing on pleasure and play would seem to run counter to the “real” work at hand. As the struggle for representation continues, the need for “serious” scholarship that legitimates the field has inadvertently created an imbalance in how we write about the lives of ethnic-racialized subjects.63 In Latina/o Studies, a field I am deeply engaged with as a scholar and teacher, popular forms of humor and play have rarely been the explicit focus of academic studies.64 Diversión foregrounds the ludic not only to provide an affective complement to the fields of Cuban and Latina/o Studies but also to better understand the necessarily complicated relationships people have with popular culture representations that capture a range of feelings that frame and enable social relations.
A Changing Cuban Miami
Popular culture circulates and succeeds because of its relationship to time: “The particularity of time in popular culture is that it is momentary, that with all its embeddedness in tradition and the historical past, it is present, it is contemporary, it is always now.”65 Concentrating on popular culture from the 1970s to the 2010s allows me to provide the quotidian texture necessary to understand this book’s second major intervention: tracing the degree to which the Cuban diaspora has changed over time in relation to politics, feelings toward the island, and the ways in which a Cuban cultural identity is performed publically—especially since the mid-1990s. The balsero (rafter) crisis of 1994 was the catalyst for policy agreements between the United States and Cuba that initiated the steady influx of Cubans into Miami that continues today. In 1994, over 30,000 Cubans took to the sea on makeshift rafts bound for the United States in response to the crushing scarcity of the Special Period.66 In 1994 and 1995, the United States and Cuba agreed to stem the tide of rafters by negotiating migration accords that included a provision that would allow at least 20,000 Cubans a year to migrate to the United States. This agreement fundamentally changed the character of the Cuban diaspora in the 1990s and beyond. According to Jorge Duany, “From 1994 to 2013, the greatest wave of migrants from Cuba arrived to the United States since the beginnings of the Cuban Revolution (563,740 Cubans legally admitted to the United States).”67 Between 2000 and 2009, 305,989 Cubans migrated to the United States—more than in any other decade in the history of migration between the two countries.68 This population is larger than the first wave of Cubans who fled between 1959 and 1962 and greater than the number who arrived in the United States during the Freedom Flights of 1965–1973.69
With the joint announcement regarding the reestablishment of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014, the number of Cubans leaving the island by raft or through border crossings (mostly Mexican) without visas has skyrocketed. In fiscal year 2011, 7,759 Cubans came to the United States this way. In 2015, 43,159 Cubans arrived in the country via ports of entry.70 They are motivated by the same difficulties that have driven Cubans to leave the island for decades: material scarcity, the search for better economic opportunities for themselves and their families, and politics, though much less a direct factor than the latter reasons. But perhaps most urgently, the uptick of migrants can be attributed to the fear that the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 that guarantees residency to any Cuban who sets foot on United States soil after one year might be repealed in the face of warming relations.
How has this influx from the island changed Cuban Miami? Trends in polling reveal that time of arrival powerfully affects one’s position on Cuba-related politics. By 2008, “only 45 percent of South Florida’s Cuban Americans continued to support the embargo. Moreover, sharp inter-cohort differences emerged. Whereas nearly two-thirds of pre-Mariel (1980) immigrants continued to support the embargo, less than one-third of post-1998 immigrants did.”71 Those with a fresher experience of life in Cuba along with strong kinship ties are the least likely to support hardline political stances toward Cuba. Arrivals since the 1990s are more like other migrants from Latin America who come to achieve greater economic stability for themselves and those they left behind. Hundreds of thousands now return to the island every year.72 Remittances have increased significantly in the twenty-first century with an estimated $2 billion a year flowing from the diaspora to Cuba.73 Cuba’s termination of the much-maligned exit visa and the United States’ five-year visa program, both instituted in 2013, have meant more freedom of movement between the two countries. Contact and exchange will likely increase if relations between the United States and Cuba continue on the path toward full normalization.
Some academic studies have called attention to these shifts. Susan Eckstein has studied how more recent arrivals to the United States are transforming life in Cuba today