Diversión. Albert Sergio Laguna
choteo brings about pleasure for the audience. Besides already being familiar to many exiles who followed his career in Cuba, Alvarez Guedes’s jokes and stories create a safe space where anxieties generated by the experience of exile can be managed pleasurably. The choteo that describes the relationship between Cubans and americanos is an explicit reminder of those common denominators of cubanía that Alvarez Guedes constantly tapped: we are different, special, and one way to articulate that is through diversión as a recognizable form of relation. Every time the audience laughs, applauds, or silently awaits the next joke, they ally themselves with Alvarez Guedes’s perspective—a view that values, champions, and furthers the cause of the exile community. Alvarez Guedes’s comic persona assumes the mantle of “defender.” The humorous, playful language functions not only as mode for reimagining the difficulties associated with exile but also as a means to create an active, critical, political consciousness united around a cultural identity threatened by American assimilationist paradigms.
As the years went by, Alvarez Guedes continued to release albums annually and remained committed to addressing the relationship between los americanos and Miami’s Cuban community. What changed was the boldness of the humor as the political climate in Miami became more hostile toward exiles. What started as a Cuban language class for “poor Americans” who can’t speak Spanish evolved into a defiant, almost brash assertion of cultural difference. Take “Viva la diferencia” (Long Live Difference) featured on Alvarez Guedes 10 (1979). Alvarez Guedes opens this story by saying, “Los cubanos se han cagado en el melting pot” (Cubans have shit on the concept of the melting pot), and follows with a list of examples detailing how Cubans have resisted the call to assimilate through the maintenance of distinct cultural characteristics.
“Shitting” on the most recognizable metaphor for American assimilation constitutes a defiant assertion of cultural legitimacy and resilience. The constant use of abject imagery in much of Alvarez Guedes’s comedic performance is consistent with literary critic Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s theorization of choteo’s scatological mode. According to Pérez Firmat, the abject language of choteo is consistent with its peripheral relation to centrist discourse. As such, choteo is “a movement toward or assault from the margins.”60 With Cubans on the margins of Miami political power in the 1970s and early 1980s, Alvarez Guedes’s comedy represents a desire to reimagine the power relations within the exilic space and to bring the margins to the center. At the same time, the jokes about negros and locas represent how in that move to the center, blackness and homosexuality were rendered abject and placed on the margins.
Choteo’s assault from the margins becomes more pronounced on Alvarez Guedes 11, recorded in the chaotic year of 1980. The tension of the anti-bilingual referendum combined with the fallout from the Mariel crisis spilled over into the material on this album. Unlike the more covert aggression of “teaching” words like “mierda” and “comemierda” to an imagined American audience on Alvarez Guedes 2, the material on this album addresses the contentiousness in Miami much more directly. In “De ayer a hoy” (“Yesterday to Today”) Alvarez Guedes discusses how Miami has changed since Cubans first arrived. He focuses again on language, explaining how speaking Spanish in Miami used to be equivalent to saying a vulgar word and citing instances when Americans would insult Cubans for not speaking English. The theme of reversal, putting the Cubans into the position of power via the humorous narrative, continues but in a much more aggressive way. He suggests that the Americans are now “trained” and are accepting of Spanish. Within this narrative, Spanish has replaced English as the dominant language. This dominance is communicated most effectively when Alvarez Guedes focuses on the reach of the Cuban community into the realm of business. To illustrate his point, Alvarez Guedes describes how he went into a pharmacy to ask for change for a dollar in order to make a phone call. He asked in English, to which the clerk responded in Spanish, “Now you want too much my brother. Now you want people to speak English here and everything.”61 The prevalence of Spanish within the economic sphere symbolizes the growing strength of the Cuban community. Cuban-owned businesses and other entrepreneurial ventures had been climbing steadily, and this humorous example not only serves as a rebuff to demands to speak English but also demonstrates the successful evolution of the Cuban enclave system in Miami standing in direct conflict with American demands for assimilation.
After giving a variety of examples as to why Americans have to learn Spanish to do business in Miami, Alvarez Guedes reaches a conclusion:
With the Cubans coming from Mariel, with those coming from the North fleeing the cold, and the Central and South Americans that are constantly arriving here, this [Miami] is going to be ours! The few Americans left are going to have to go to hell. We are going to open a relocalization center to send them to whatever city that speaks English.62
Amidst raucous laughter, he then goes on to explain that while Spanish is on top, it must be instituted in everything. He makes fun of those people and business names that mix English and Spanish together and then closes with his utopic vision of Miami:
I always say that Miami will not be perfect until the day that a Cuban police officer arrests an American for a transit violation. The Cuban police officer takes the American to a Cuban judge and when the judge says, “Guilty or innocent?” and the American tells the judge [in badly inflected Spanish], “Yo no hablar español” the judge says [angrily], “Oh, you don’t speak Spanish? Well, to school you go, damn it! Six months until you learn!”63
The “perfect” Miami that Alvarez Guedes envisions is met with laughter and applause from the audience because of the irreverent attitude and subversive rhetoric directed toward those in power—both hallmarks of choteo.64 But the approval that the audience’s reaction signifies stands in direct opposition to the anxiousness felt by Cubans and non-Cubans alike throughout 1980. Even in the context of Mariel, when Alvarez Guedes recorded this joke, his desire is to unite by including the marielitos in the narrative of the exile community despite the negative press surrounding them. Discussing the relationship between americanos and Cubans during this period through choteo is a way to filter this social anxiety and consolidate the exile community while simultaneously lodging a critique against the language politics in Miami in the early 1980s through choteo’s leveling tendency.
At the same time, Alvarez Guedes and his audience are coming to grips with the reality of exile and the gradual loss of faith in the narrative of return. The inability to participate or contribute to the sociopolitical reality of life in Cuba necessitates a certain shift of psychic, social, and economic resources. Miami must become home; what could not be done in Cuba will be attempted here. Imagining South Florida through the narrative form of choteo is just one step toward making Miami “home.” With the subversive, humorous perspective that choteo affords, the struggles that arise out of dealing with a now hostile establishment in Miami can be confronted through a ludic lens that produces pleasure, if only temporarily, within the context of Alvarez Guedes’s performance.65
In 1982, Alvarez Guedes released his best-selling and certainly most unique album titled Alvarez Guedes 14: How to Defend Yourself from the Cubans. What makes this album so exceptional is that it is the only one he released that features him performing primarily in English. The album is a mixture of an expansion on his Cuban language classes and some old material from previous albums translated into English.
With Spanish becoming nearly ubiquitous in Miami, Alvarez Guedes suggests that non-Spanish speakers must be able to “defend” themselves by learning some key phrases. The meaning of the phrase “se defienden,” used earlier to articulate how Cubans in Miami described their tenuous grip on the English language, completely changes in the context of this performance. The repeal of Miami’s status as a bilingual city moves Alvarez Guedes to reconsider his earlier, playful utopian idea of a city where everyone speaks English and Spanish. On this album, non-Spanish speakers are identified as those who need to “get by” and “defend” themselves by learning Spanish. If they do not, they risk being unable to navigate a Miami that has undergone radical change with the influx of immigrants from Latin America, most specifically Cubans. The text quoted below is from the very beginning of the album when Alvarez Guedes first greets his audience:
I’ve been watching very closely what’s been happening in Miami lately and I believe that something has to be done in favor of those who can’t speak Spanish