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      Un Tipo Típico

      Alvarez Guedes Takes the Stage

      I don’t remember when I heard my first joke by Cuban exile comedian Guillermo Alvarez Guedes. His comedy has always been in my life, hiding in plain sight. I came to this realization early on in graduate school when I sat down to write a seminar paper on exile humor and decided to listen to all of his albums. It was then that I realized that my father, one of the funniest people I know, had been cracking Alvarez Guedes’s jokes for years without much in the way of citation—a practice his son will not duplicate in the chapters to come. I didn’t grow up with Alvarez Guedes albums in my house. They didn’t play in the background of family parties, or on long car rides as so many others have told me anecdotally. His radio show in Miami didn’t reach my home in New Jersey. Yet there he was the whole time, appearing in the joke repertoire of family and friends.

      As I show in the introduction, there are many examples of diversión from those early years of the Cuban exile community that I could have addressed in this first chapter: the lively theater scene, tabloid satirical newspapers like Zig-Zag Libre and Chispa, or folkloric events like Añorada Cuba. But Alvarez Guedes is truly the only way a book focused on ludic popular culture in the Cuban diaspora can start. What made him so unique was his durability and popularity across multiple generations of the diaspora over a career that spanned over half a century. Best known for his standup comedy, Alvarez Guedes released thirty-two live albums from the 1970s through the early 2000s. These recordings continue to serve as Cuban social and cultural capital. How many times have I heard someone say, “That reminds me of an Alvarez Guedes joke” and then break out into his or her best rendition? The embeddedness of his jokes is so pronounced that I have even heard people use snippets of his material like “tú eres como el tipo del gato” as a kind of metaphoric shorthand to describe a person or situation—in this case a pessimist.1 This popularity extends beyond his rank and file audience to other professional comedians on and off the island. Every single artist I write about in this book cites him as a vital influence. Starting with Alvarez Guedes, then, also provides a useful point of departure for thinking through genealogies of diversión in the Cuban diaspora.

      Though his influence reverberates across generations, this chapter takes a much more focused approach through an examination of his comedy in the 1970s and 1980s. Even then, in those early years of his career in exile, Alvarez Guedes was looked upon as a kind of model exile subject. His standing among the community is best summed up in an article written by Cristina Saralegui for El Miami Herald in 1976, years before she built her talk-show empire: “Ahora, Guillermo Alvarez Guedes es EL TIPICO CUBANO EXILIADO (Now, Guillermo Alvarez Guedes is THE TYPICAL CUBAN EXILE).2 Alvarez Guedes’s status as un tipo típico—a Cuban everyman—is partially due to his politics, which were in many ways in tune with what Lisandro Pérez has called the “exile ideology.” Its characteristics include continuing to attach importance to politics in Cuba; hostility against the Cuban government; conservative, Republican political views; and general intolerance for those whose perspectives on Cuba differ.3 Informing what it meant to be Cuban off the island, this ideology manifested itself in a “behavioral repertoire … ranging from supporting right-wing candidates to opposing publicly anyone voicing sympathy for the Cuban regime.”4 Not content to limit his anti-communist humor to Miami, Alvarez Guedes travelled to Nicaragua to perform a set for the Contras in 1986.5

      These politics informed Alvarez Guedes’s larger performance of exile cubanía—a Cuban cultural identity inflected with the politics of the exile ideology. But that was not enough to make him un tipo típico. More importantly, Alvarez Guedes reflected back what his audience wanted to see in itself: a wise-cracking anti-communist with a magnetic affability who could take the turbulence of exile politics and life in Miami and use it as fodder for diversión. Perhaps more than any other Cuban exile artist, Alvarez Guedes insisted upon a ludic sociability that cohered around a narrative of proud, pleasurable exile cubanía mediated through his humor. My research has yet to turn up a negative review of his work. In fact, I argue that people wanted to like him and what his humor represented—an almost utopic narrative of a united exile community that people wanted to believe was possible. His stories about “nosotros, los cubanos” (we, the Cubans) were narratives of unity around a broad notion of cubanía and anti-Castro politics, which served as a distraction from the very real tensions within the exile community. Old grudges from Cuba, past and present political affiliations, and disagreements about how best to bring about change on the island were some of the issues that divided the community from within.6 Disagreement and even violence among exiles convinced of their views as the best way forward for “liberating” Cuba were common. Alvarez Guedes’s albums emphasized common ground through hostility toward Castro, shared Cuban cultural characteristics, Cuban-Anglo relations in Miami, and the manner for engaging these topics through the recognizable codes of Cuban speech and humor. In short, Alvarez Guedes’s performances and persona were powerful interlocking sites of identification for Cubans looking to affirm their cultural identities outside the island in a way that put aside the tensions inside the exile community in a Miami plagued by drug wars, a slumping economy, and anti-Cuban sentiment in the 1970s and 1980s.

      Far from simply serving as a cathartic release from the tensions roiling Cuban Miami, Alvarez Guedes’s performances illustrate the role of diversión in forging a narrative of Cuban exile identity that privileged whiteness and heteronormativity while simultaneously speaking back to discrimination from Anglo Miamians. It is in the messiness of popular culture, the way a derogatory joke about blacks can exist on the same album criticizing discrimination against Cubans, that we get at the contradictions that structure quotidian life. But before jumping into my close listenings of the material, more background on Alvarez Guedes’s performance practice is necessary to understand why he has been such an important figure in the history of Cuban diasporic popular culture.

      Alvarez Guedes, “The Natural”

      Alvarez Guedes was a mainstay in exile entertainment for decades. He released over thirty-two standup comedy albums, published joke books and novels, and produced and starred in a number of television and film projects.7 He co-founded a label called GEMA Records, which released the music of celebrated artists and groups such as Bebo Valdés, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, Celeste Mendoza, Elena Burke, and Chico O’Farrill. When Alvarez Guedes died in 2013 at the age of eighty-six, tributes and commemorations poured in from Cubans across generations on and off the island. Despite having his material outlawed in Cuba, it has always circulated there clandestinely. High-profile personalities, including comedians, took to the Internet to express their admiration. Island-based Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez tweeted, “Maestro Alvarez Guedes! Know that here we have continued to listen to you, covertly, all this time!”8 In Miami, where the comedian spent most of his life, his death took over the news cycle for days, with bloggers, journalists, and television hosts covering his death and legacy, often through tears.

      Although he is generally known for his work in exile, Alvarez Guedes got his start in the entertainment