Diversión. Albert Sergio Laguna

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      2

      Cuban Miami on the Air

      But radio in Miami will continue to be, without a doubt, its most faithful reflection and even if it’s shouted or preached, applauded to insanity or thrashed verbally in opposition, one must recognize its unique and predominant role, the mirror that reflects us, the exponent of our idiosyncrasy. It is clever, controversial and vigorous radio just like the Cuba that witnessed our birth and it’s reborn here now.

      —Heberto Padilla, El Miami Herald, 1986

      Famed Cuban poet Heberto Padilla’s praise for radio in the pages of El Miami Herald not only highlights its powerful role in the city’s media landscape in the 1980s but also gestures toward radio’s significant place in Cuban culture historically.1 Since the first radio broadcast in Havana in 1922, radio has played a prominent role in Cuban cultural life on and off the island.2 When Cubans began leaving for the United States after the Revolution, they brought their love of radio with them. Those well versed in Cuba’s radio industry were able to redeploy their talent and skills in the exile context. The result was the beginning of a vibrant radio culture in Miami, which continues today. Currently, Miami is the third largest Latino/a radio market in the United States—a statistic powered in large part by the city’s Cuban population. But does radio continue to provide a “faithful reflection” of the Cuban community, as Padilla suggests? Has it ever? How can listening to radio programming that features Cuba-related content in South Florida in the first decade of the twenty-first century help us understand Cuban Miami in new ways?

      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 СКАЧАТЬ