Diversión. Albert Sergio Laguna
socialism as the islanders knew it.”74 Chris Girard, Guillermo Grenier, and Hugh Gladwin have chronicled the “declining symbolic significance” of the embargo among Cuban Americans in South Florida.75 Yet the mainstream narrative of Cubans in the United States as a homogenous group united in its conservative politics has been stubbornly resistant to change despite shifting political opinions among exiles and dramatic demographic and generational changes: “Because exile serves as such a powerful unifying experience for a people, the tendency has been to categorize all Cubans living in exile as sharing the same political identity and political culture.”76
While arrivals since the 1990s have reached record numbers, the largest cohort of Cubans consists of the US-born—primarily the children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren of the original exile generation. Of the approximately 2 million Cuban and Cuban Americans counted in the United States census, 40 percent were born in the United States. Because most US-born Cuban Americans have never lived on the island, cubanía is learned from parents, family, and the anti-Castro media and symbolism that have historically saturated Cuban Miami.77 Despite this, poll data has shown that US-born Cuban Americans are less committed to hardline stances toward Cuba. The lack of personal experience with the Revolution allows for some emotional distance and, on many Cuba-related issues, a far less conservative approach.78 This is not to say that one will find many supporters of Castro among the US-born. The Castro brothers, along with Che Guevara, are symbols charged with contempt—the reasons for the “lost Cuba” invoked by older family members, friends, and Cuban Miami’s larger anti-communist imaginary. Nonetheless, the US-born generation is more open to dismantling the embargo, allowing travel, and engaging the Cuban government in dialogue than their parents and grandparents.79 This group has completely fallen through the cracks of contemporary scholarship. Throughout the book, I detail how the US-born are performing and invoking cubanía through diversión and what this means for the present and future of the Cuban diaspora. In this context, the translatability of diversión into the English diversion is particularly useful as I chart the relationships to cubanía enacted by US-born generations.
Because the majority of Cubans in the United States today is composed of the US-born and arrivals since the 1990s, the term exile with its attendant political and emotional baggage fails to capture the reality of the diaspora today not only in Miami, but also in cities like Houston and Louisville, which have growing Cuban populations. For this reason, I use the term diaspora when referring to Cubans in the United States generally. I use the phrase exile community to reference those who arrived during the earlier waves from 1959–1973. Today, fervent anti-Castro politics, the Republican Party, and conservative positions on US-Cuba relations no longer grip the diaspora the way they did historically. This is the shift I aim to illuminate in my work through an emphasis on how these changes look, sound, feel, and resonate in quotidian life. Statistics cannot fully capture how different generational cohorts interact with and represent each other. Nor can they capture the points of conflict and connection. Diversión will serve as the means by which the statistics come to life by highlighting the multiple narratives of cubanía that are being articulated and the inherent messiness of diasporic formations.
The book proceeds in five chapters. In the first, “Un Tipo Típico: Alvarez Guedes Takes the Stage,” I discuss in more detail the career of beloved exile comedian Guillermo Alvarez Guedes. I use his comedy to understand the centrality of the ludic at a moment in the history of the exile community rarely discussed in playful terms: the late 1970s and 1980s. The Mariel crisis, domestic terrorism against alleged Castro sympathizers, and the drug trade in Miami created strife within the community and turned the tide of public opinion against Cuban Americans. The chapter argues that Alvarez Guedes’s popular comic performances helped to consolidate a Cuban exile identity premised on whiteness and heteronormativity while simultaneously pushing back against discrimination against Cubans from Anglo Miamians.
In the second chapter, “Cuban Miami on the Air,” the book moves to the twenty-first century in order to begin a conversation about a changing Cuban Miami wherein the majority of Cubans is made up of the US-born generations and more recent arrivals since 1994. I historicize the prominent role of radio in Cuban Miami—specifically the conservative genre of exile talk radio—and then devote myself to comedy bits performed on the Enrique y Joe Show and the Enrique Santos Show. These radio programs sat at the top of Miami’s ratings charts throughout the 2000s. Enrique Santos and Joe Ferrero, both US-born Cuban Americans, proudly performed the narrative of cubanía learned from the exile generation through their use of idiomatic expressions, accents, and their famous prank call to Fidel Castro himself. But their satires and pranks also marked a shift in the handling of Cuba-related topics on the air through the articulation of a far less conservative approach that demonstrates how a Cuban diasporic identity need not be bundled with a particular political ideology. Contextualizing these performances in relation to their audience of other US-born Cuban Americans, the corporate investment of Univision in the Miami radio market in the 2000s, and more recent arrivals from the island provides a means to understand Cuban Miami’s shifting demographics and media landscape in the 2000s.
Chapter 3, “Nostalgic Pleasures,” takes up a concept that has achieved a kind of keyword status in Cuban American Studies: nostalgia. The chapter tracks nostalgia not as an ambivalent sentiment but as a historically public form of diversión, paying special attention to a festival held annually since 1999 in Miami called Cuba Nostalgia. Cuba Nostalgia has celebrated pre-Castro Cuba through a combination of spectacle and consumption. Musical genres popular before the Revolution play while businesses dedicated to selling Cuban memorabilia dot the fairgrounds. With the demographics of Cuban Miami rapidly shifting, I argue that Cuba Nostalgia is not only a means for reveling in nostalgic memories of a pre-Castro Cuba but also a nostalgia for nostalgia—a longing for a feeling that could be counted on to rally a community historically fractured across class and political lines. The event is a kind of monument in motion to an idealized memory of a united, exilic Miami as that generation fades. Through an examination of the event’s focus on education and consumption, I theorize the ways in which generations of Cubans intersect and interact with this narrative of pre-Castro Cuba in order to reveal the transnational and future-oriented stakes of nostalgia.
Years before Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro announced the reestablishment of diplomatic relations on December 17, 2014, ties between the two countries had been intensifying due to increased contact between the diaspora and the island. In Chapter 4, “The Transnational Life of Diversión,” I examine the flows of ludic popular culture between both spaces in order to elaborate the central contention of this chapter: the movement of popular culture is indicative of the intensification of transnational contact born out of political and demographic changes on both sides and a means by which this intensification occurs. The first part of this chapter focuses on the standup comedy of island-based comedians, which appeals to Cubans who arrived in Miami since 1994—a group rarely discussed in cultural studies scholarship on the diaspora—and its racialized and gendered underpinnings. The second half examines how popular culture produced in the United States circulates in Cuba through a phenomenon called el paquete semanal (the weekly package). El paquete refers to the sale and circulation of media content primarily produced off the island, mainly from the United States. In addition to keeping up with popular American sitcoms and the latest Hollywood blockbusters, television produced by Cubans in South Florida is also immensely popular. People on the island can now watch Cuban artists who have permanently left the island perform nightly on South Florida television. The ubiquitous presence of el paquete and popular culture produced in the United States more broadly across the island are important sites for understanding the social and economic changes occurring in Cuba under Raúl Castro. Looking at the movement of popular culture between the island and the diaspora will also allow me to highlight how intensifying transnational contact, continuity, and exchange are affecting and reflecting the lives of Cubans on and off the island, culturally and economically.
The fifth and final chapter, “Digital Diversión,” moves away from examining geographic locales to consider the rising importance of digital spaces in mediating diasporic identities. In this chapter, I seek to trace how cubanía echoes online through close readings of popular, highly circulated forms