Diversión. Albert Sergio Laguna

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СКАЧАТЬ 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Act of 1966 that guarantees residency to any Cuban who sets foot on United States soil after one year might be repealed in the face of warming relations.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 as a result of the “social and economic ties across borders” that have “eroded 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 СКАЧАТЬ