Diversión. Albert Sergio Laguna

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СКАЧАТЬ The mobilization of the Cuban vote against this issue would serve as an example of what was possible when the community voted as a bloc—a prelude perhaps to the Cuban political dominance of South Florida that would begin to develop in earnest in the 1980s.50 Only seven years after Cubans in Miami rallied behind the Bryant initiative to repeal the anti-discrimination act, they stood up and applauded Improper Conduct for its condemnation of the Cuban government’s treatment of sexual minorities.

      There are perhaps less obvious reasons for this preoccupation with sexuality and masculinity. The hypermasculine posturing of the exile community and its resistance to a gay rights agenda can be read partially as a response to a certain crisis of masculinity stirred by the profound impotence felt as a consequence of the consistent failure to effect political change in Cuba. The terrible rout of CIA-trained Cuban exiles during the Bay of Pigs Invasion is the most visible example of this impotence. But in truth, Fidel Castro’s vitality and carefully curated masculine image—his green fatigues signaling readiness for battle—served as a constant reminder in those early years to the exile community of who “the real man” was. The need to constantly assert a strong, masculine presence was thus extremely important to the exile community, as was displacement of that failed masculinity. Satirical Cuban exile tabloid periodicals often represented Fidel Castro as a woman in the service of amorous Russians.51 Raúl Castro, followed by rumors of closeted homosexuality since the early years of the Revolution, is consistently represented as una loca in political cartooning even today. It is telling that the government official most often imagined as una loca is the official with the most symbolically “masculine” post as head of the Cuban Armed Forces. Choteo becomes a way to displace failed masculinity onto the communists while consolidating its antithesis in exile—a white, potent masculinity emphasized in popular culture and politics.

      Like his jokes about race, Alvarez Guedes’s material about sexuality is a meaningful site to pause and consider the ways in which Cubans combined and reconciled social codes and attitudes on the island with those of the United States. Choteo’s long history as a popular and quotidian strategy for narrating Cuban national identity and its racial and sexual preoccupations surfaces in the exile context to do similar work. But as I explain in the next section, the articulation of exile cubanía with a claim on the privileges of normative whiteness in the United States did meet resistance from Anglo Miami.

      Cubano-Americano Tensions

      Alvarez Guedes’s comedy was not just a means to claim an abstract, privileged whiteness. Instead, exiles were invested in a distinctly Cuban whiteness that also resisted Anglo assimilationist paradigms. Built into the rhetoric of exile is the notion of forced departure and the fantasy of return. These two elements of the exile narrative strongly informed the desire to maintain Cuban cultural characteristics and the performances of cultural nationalism that permeate Alvarez Guedes’s comedy. Unsurprisingly, this led to tensions between exiles and the Anglo majority throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Miami. It is out of these tensions that one of Alvarez Guedes’s most popular and recurring targets for the anti-authoritarianism of choteo surfaces, “los americanos.”

      Exiles arriving in the first two waves of migration during 1959–1974 enjoyed a warm welcome from the US government. Aside from hoping that the physical movement of so many Cubans would destabilize Castro’s new government, the United States held up the example of the exodus as proof of the evils and failures of communism. This helped to supplement the aggressive, anti-communist propaganda effort in the Americas during the Cold War. To drive the point home, Cuban success in the United States would prove that the American capitalist system was superior to communism. For these and other politically expedient reasons, Cubans were granted refugee status and received a number of benefits in the form of federal assistance.52

      On the local level, Cubans received a great deal of support from the city of Miami. This is especially true in regard to language policy. Max Castro identifies the three most significant policies regarding language laws as the implementation of “bilingual education in the Dade county public schools in 1963, the declaration of Metropolitan Dade County as officially bilingual and bicultural in 1973 and the creation of El Herald in 1976.”53 The fact that these laws existed is quite extraordinary, and they helped facilitate, to some degree, the transition from Cuba to the United States. At the very least, the policies adopted in Miami were symbolic of a certain degree of cultural tolerance.

      But the welcome from the federal and local government did not always coincide with life on the ground. María Cristina García explains that locals resented Cubans both for the financial assistance they received from the government (often more than citizens) and for their “boisterous” behavior.54 Adding to this resentment was the creation and sustainment of a Cuban ethnic enclave,55 which reduced the pressure to assimilate. As the size and economic power of the community grew, so did resistance and opposition to what many non-Cubans in Miami referred to as the Cuban “takeover” of the city.

      The frustrations of “native” Miamians reached a boiling point in 1980 with the circumstances surrounding the Mariel crisis. The Miami Herald railed against President Carter’s weak, undefined policy regarding Mariel and the exile community’s desire to facilitate the exodus and the subsequent resettlement of refugees in Miami. Editors at the paper used Castro’s characterization of the marielitos as social misfits to justify their aggressive stance toward the new arrivals and the exile community more broadly. Alejandro Portes and Alex Stepick define the perceived threat to the establishment this way: “first as an economic cataclysm, given the depressed state of local industry and the negative impact of the inflow on Miami’s status as a tourist destination; and second, as a direct threat to the establishment power structure, given the addition of many thousands to an already uncomfortably large Cuban population.”56 In the time leading up to and after the boatlift, the Miami Herald actively played up these threats and effectively agitated the non-Cuban population in Miami.

      With the white establishment bent on asserting power in a time of rapid change, the modern English-Only movement was born in Miami with an anti-bilingual referendum. It passed, and in November 1980, the ordinance changed the policies of biculturalism and bilingualism in Dade County instituted in the early 1970s.57 Much as it did in the repeal of the 1977 amendment prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexuality, Miami had taken one step forward and two steps back. But these direct attempts by the Miami Herald and local government to limit the power of the Cuban community did not achieve the desired effect: “Instead of subduing the Cubans, the hegemonic discourse of the Herald and its allies transformed the exile community into a self-conscious ethnic group that organized effectively for local political competition.”58 By the mid-1980s, Cuban-born politicians held important government posts on the local and state levels. In 1981, the influential Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was founded with Jorge Mas Canosa at the helm.

      With all these events roiling Miami, Alvarez Guedes performed regularly, cementing his reputation as un tipo típico. Much of his comedic production during this time addressed the hot-button language issue and the general culture clash well underway in Miami. As the inflammatory rhetoric and tension between Anglos and the exile community escalated, so did the tone and aggression of Alvarez Guedes’s material. Choteo’s anti-hierarchical strain became a means to confront Anglo political power while simultaneously attempting to consolidate an exile cubanía founded on national characteristics, anti-Castro sentiment, cultural expressions, and, as discussed previously, whiteness and heteronormativity. Directing some aggression outward toward los americanos created a welcome respite from the infighting, while the tried and true strategy of identifying an outside threat served to buttress a communal narrative of the exile community as being free from internal conflict.

      Clases de Idioma Cubano

      Language has always been Alvarez Guedes’s favorite topic. One of his most popular running gags, titled “Clases de idioma cubano” (Cuban Language Classes), began in 1974, when Miami was still officially a bilingual city. The albums that include these Cuban language classes always feature them as the last track. The reason is clear: they absolutely bring the house down. СКАЧАТЬ