Diversión. Albert Sergio Laguna
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for No hay mal que dure 100 años … ni pueblo que lo resista, 1979. Courtesy of the Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.
I will argue throughout this book that this archive of diversión, and its broad impact on life in Cuban Miami, cannot be divorced from strategies for capital accumulation. But a crucial distinction is in order. This is not a study of how Cubanness or latinidad more broadly has been commodified for white audiences in the United States.48 Diversión, as it is conceived here, is not the overpriced Cuban restaurant in your town covered in sepia prints of ’57 Chevys and servers in freshly pressed guayaberas. This does not mean that this popular culture functions outside the world of the market. Instead, I argue that analyzing popular culture created by and for ethnic-racialized subjects provides a glimpse into understanding the role capital plays in mediating social relations and cultural production on local and transnational levels: the “selling” of nostalgia in the form of prerevolutionary knickknacks in stores and online; the circulation of popular culture between Miami and Cuba and the financial considerations that go into those flows; and corporate media conglomerates like Univision muscling into the local radio market in Miami and their influence on content.
If diversión has been so pervasive because of its resonance among the diaspora and the role of capital, why has there been so little scholarship on these forms and practices within Cuban American Studies? This lack of engagement with the ludic can be explained partially by the incongruity it faces when put into dialogue with the “usual” affective registers used to describe the exile experience.49 Exile is displacement; displacement is painful. The echoes of loss, abandonment, and deracination encoded within the word exile and the baggage it carries with it have limited the term’s signifying potential. But this equation of exile with loss and its attendant hardships cannot be explained only by how the concept signifies in broader scholarly and popular imaginations. The relationship between exile, affect, and politics must also be taken into account. In the Cuban context, the feelings associated with exile can be invoked to reinforce claims on Cuban American exceptionalism based on political motivations for leaving the island. This performance has been necessary to maintain a claim on the privileges extended to Cuban émigrés: a pathway to legal status through the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966 and access to federal programs created by the US government to aid those fleeing communism during the Cold War.50 Of course, I do not mean to suggest in using the word performance that exilic affect is somehow disingenuous. Instead, I seek to stress the importance of affect as a means for making claims to the benefits of exile as a category, especially in the context of the Cold War United States.51 Historically, the Cuban American lobby in Washington and elected officials have worn the pathos of exile on their sleeves while pushing for a more confrontational foreign policy toward Cuba.
I do not seek to delegitimize the many works of scholarship and art that have foregrounded the very real pain of exile to tell the story of Cuban America. That pain, too, is part of this study with diversión serving as a means to process and manage it. But in privileging the ludic, I hope to get at something as prevalent and quotidian as pain—the shared pleasures within a community that play a vital role in representing and shaping the present. The material I examine in this book does not win awards or attract a great deal of academic attention. It cannot be found on syllabi. The archive I have assembled is most often engaged on the living room couch in front of a television, long car rides with Alvarez Guedes albums playing, social media feeds, celebrations with family and friends, or nights out on the town. I have attended the festivals and interviewed comedians and event organizers inside and outside of Cuba. I have spent a great deal of time on Facebook and in the deepest recesses of the Cuban blogosphere, and I have gotten sucked in to an untold number of YouTube content loops. For years, I have experienced these popular culture forms not only as an exercise in academic analysis, but also as a means to make my way through the world, like so many others. This work has brought me a great deal of pleasure through the years but it has also brought me disappointment, even a mix of the two simultaneously. It is this multivalence of popular culture, its ability to bring pleasure as well as “rage, and frustration about its silences, exclusions and assaults,” that I take up now.52
Arroz con Mango
The archive of diversión detailed above highlights those cultural forms meant to make people feel good through laughter and communal celebrations. But it is crucial to stir the pot a bit and introduce an analytical thread that will appear throughout this study: the role of race and sexuality. Throughout the writing of this book, colleagues—especially those with knowledge of Cuban popular culture—have expressed enthusiasm mixed with a sentiment best captured with a phrase from Cuban vernacular speech: arroz con mango. The phrase, which literally translates to rice with mango, describes a messy or complicated situation, a contradiction that produces headaches. For a scholar deeply committed to critical race theory and social justice projects, studying diversión can often result in generous helpings of arroz con mango. Comic tropes around blackness, women, and homosexuality continue to function as reliable, if not tired elements, of popular culture production. The relationship between race, gender, sexuality, and diversión represents a kind of transnational continuity identifiable throughout “Greater Cuba.”53 This most clearly manifests itself in humor that is dominated by men and utilizes representational strategies inflected with racism, homophobia, and sexism. It is in exploring this basic dynamic—that feeling good can come at the expense of others—that we can further grasp the intersecting, and at times contradictory, narratives that affect how communities come to imagine themselves.
I address this dynamic throughout the book, especially with regard to race and the production of Cuban American whiteness.54 Antonio López has taken up this question directly, discussing how this whiteness has been historically constituted “at a distance from the majority of island Afro Cubans, yet in close, segregated, often conflictive proximity to African Americans in the United States, especially in Miami.”55 Despite scholars suggesting that Cubans paid little attention to African Americans in Miami, the popular archive indicates otherwise.56 I will show the ways racial codes from the United States and Cuba have and continue to be melded together in a thoroughly transnational sense to reproduce this Cuban American whiteness over time. It is in the realm of the popular that we can see the crucial role race has played in consolidating a Cuban American identity in South Florida.
Focusing on how narratives of whiteness circulate in popular culture is essential for understanding social relations not only among Cuban Americans but across Latina/o groups. While race and ethnicity in the Latina/o context is often discussed as in conflict with United States regimes of white supremacy, scholarship has examined the place of whiteness and anti-black sentiment within Latina/o communities.57 More of this work is necessary. Attention to ludic popular culture, in particular, can provide access to those notions that circulate within a community, unsaid yet understood. Inside jokes and ideas about the other are often invoked under the sign of the comic as audiences revel in having narratives of group identity with wide currency defamiliarized through humor. Examining popular forms can be an especially insightful avenue for understanding the ways in which these communities come to understand themselves in a quotidian register and how negative conceptions around race and other ethnic groups structure social relations, even acting as a barrier to broader coalitional politics.
But the point of considering race and discrimination is not to somehow separate “good” diversión from the “bad.” As Stuart Hall usefully reminds us, cultural forms are not “either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic. Whereas, they are deeply contradictory; they play on contradictions, especially when they function in the domain of the ‘popular.’ ”58 The binary logic of resistance/suppression does not adequately account for the messiness of, and our complex attachments to, popular culture forms that can produce pleasure, anger, and disappointment, sometimes simultaneously. Keeping this in mind will allow for a more nuanced understanding of how racist jokes can be uttered right after a satirical skewing of Anglo discrimination in South Florida. It can shed light on how blackface representations on Miami television in the twenty-first century reproduce racist tropes from Cuba that hearken back to the nineteenth century but also play a role in unraveling conservative resistance to improved relations between the United States and Cuba.
A critical approach attentive to the contradictions of popular culture moves us away from simply identifying racist representations and toward asking more productive questions.