ranging from dramas to comedies. In 1951, he debuted the character that would make him famous in Cuba, El Borracho (the drunk), on the nation’s nascent television network, CMQ-TV. Shortly after Fidel Castro rose to power in 1959, he left Cuba with his family for cities with large concentrations of Cuban exiles such as New York, Madrid, and Puerto Rico. He lived in Miami from 1961 to 1968 and settled permanently in the city in 1980, though he performed there throughout the 1970s. He began recording his standup albums in 1973.
Alvarez Guedes performed on television, film, and radio throughout his career, but most people know his performances through his live standup albums. All of these recordings essentially follow the same format. Once his trademark music signals his entrance on stage, he goes right into his material, usually by rattling off a succession of quick jokes. Two-thirds of the way into his performance, there is usually a shift from jokes to a story format marked by observational humor related to social and political issues deemed worthy of attention.9 There is hardly ever interaction between Alvarez Guedes and his audience (the Mariel joke mentioned in the introduction is a notable exception), but this does not mean that the audience is passive. There are no laugh tracks on these albums. Listening closely will reveal the running commentary of the audience in between episodic, raucous laughter, with approving phrases voicing agreement (“It’s so true!”) mixing with sounds ranging from high-pitched cackles to deep belly laughs. The albums were recorded in clubs, restaurants, or studios that Alvarez Guedes rented out for that purpose. The audience consisted of people he invited and their friends for a total of about thirty to forty people in all. The result was a profoundly intimate experience for the audience, which in turn is communicated to the listener of the album. The atmospheric applause and laughter audible on more contemporary standup albums is missing here. Instead, the listener can get a feel for the individuality of audience members and their unique-sounding laughs, their particular utterances, and the cadence of their clapping. In the context of the performance, these expressions of joyful approval sound Cuban. The auditory experience of these recordings makes it possible to laugh not only at Alvarez Guedes’s performance but also with members of the audience in a way that heightens the intimacy and pleasure of communal identification that he himself sought to cultivate.
As the description of the recordings above suggests, the album format begs for a consideration of the way the performance sounds. Identification takes place on the auditory level: it includes Alvarez Guedes’s routine, the distinctive musical accompaniment, and the audience’s reactions. For listeners familiar with Cuban speech (dialect, voice inflection, modes of expression) Alvarez Guedes would be instantly recognizable as Cuban without him ever saying so. His use of pauses in his stories, the way he exaggerates the pronunciation of certain words, and the strategic use of repetition contribute to the Cuban feel of the auditory experience. As he begins to speak, it becomes clear to his audience that he is Cuban, someone who has endured a set of historical circumstances around exile similar to what they have experienced. Confident and convincing in his role as un tipo típico, he offsets the precariousness and impotence of the exile condition through the creation of a stable, relaxed, inviting space where his performance functions as a means for negotiating the at times difficult experience of exile through diversión. The pleasures of group identification and playful narrative technique combine to produce a ludic sociability among an audience now comfortable with temporarily suspending its usual defensive positions regarding Cuba and the complexities of exile life.
Figure 1.1. Alvarez Guedes performing for audience. Date unknown. Courtesy of Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami.
While his albums and performances quickly became hits among exiles, success did not come immediately for the comedian after leaving the island. In a 2007 interview titled “Guillermo Álvarez Guedes, El Natural,” he describes the difficulty in finding work in the Spanish-language entertainment industry during those early years of exile in the 1960s and 1970s: “To make a living as an actor in those days, you had to be an actor in television soap operas, and to work in television soap operas, you had to have what they called a neutral accent. When they told me that I said, ‘What the hell is a neutral accent? I have a Cuban accent; I don’t know what it means to speak neutrally.’ ”10 This hostility to the entertainment industry’s demand that he tame his tongue created the foundation for his career in exile. Throughout this interview, Alvarez Guedes constantly refers to his commitment to performing “naturally”—a performance practice marked by his use of Cuban vernacular, specifically the corpus of “bad words” that he believed to be authentically Cuban and that lend a quality of “realism” to his artistic production.
The idea of a “natural” cubanía followed Alvarez Guedes throughout his career in exile. His fans and Cuban cultural commentators have long used the term to describe him. Carlos Alberto Montaner, a major voice in the exile community, wrote a short piece published on the back of the Alvarez Guedes 4 album sleeve in celebration of the comedian’s “pasmosa naturalidad” (astonishing naturalness).11 Emilio Ichikawa, journalist and commentator on all things Cuban on and off the island, similarly alludes to the quintessential cubanía of Alvarez Guedes by naming him “nuestro antropólogo mayor” (our great anthropologist), a man who has “penetrated the codes of Cubanity” and who “doesn’t fail to measure the psychophysical temperature of the community.”12 After his death, press coverage echoed sentiments expressed by journalists like Wilfredo Cancio Isla: “Guillermo Alvarez Guedes has died, king of the joke and cubanidad. The man who succeeded in reconciling Cubans everywhere, from the island and the world, through the universal language of laughter.”13
The “naturalness” that commentators have attributed to Alvarez Guedes is due in part to sonic aspects of his performance that I have already mentioned: his accent, tone, and the words he uses. But it is not simply a matter of a one-to-one relationship between sound and ethnic identification. The “naturalness” is a product of how he tells his jokes, the particular style and delivery that make it feel like a Cuban practice. This practice can be best described as falling under the tradition of choteo. Choteo is a form of humor and mockery common among the masses and articulated through the idiomatic specificity of Cuban popular culture. As Cuban cultural critic Jorge Mañach wrote in his 1928 essay, “Indagación del choteo” (Investigation of Choteo), it is “a form of relation typically ours.”14 It is a recognizable, culturally specific form of diversión and interaction that acts as a way to filter serious or distressing experiences in a nonserious, anti-authoritarian, and irreverent manner and thereby also provides an alternative, critically ludic perspective on people, events, and other social and political phenomena that would not otherwise be objects of jest. The “naturalness” of Alvarez Guedes’s choteo, then, becomes a way to help make the “unnatural” state of exile bearable in quotidian life.
Figure 1.2. Guillermo Alvarez Guedes, album cover for Alvarez Guedes 8, 1978.
Alvarez Guedes’s diversión, deployed through his use of choteo and overall performance practice, is not the sole reason for his designation as a “natural” performer, “the typical Cuban exile” that Cristina Saralegui described. Implicitly informing this naturalness is his whiteness. Though his fans primarily experienced his comedy by listening, his likeness was never far behind: it is featured on each of his album covers. Encoded within his “naturalness” is a narrative that manifests itself in jokes that assert whiteness and heteronormativity as part of the communal narrative of exile cubanía. In the section that follows, I examine jokes from the 1970s and 1980s as sites for understanding how the Cuban exile community reconciled attitudes about race and sexuality with US perspectives. Though jokes on race and sexuality in no way represent the majority of the content on his albums, when they do arise these comic bits shine a light on the ongoing project to articulate a cultural identity in exile and its normative boundaries at historical moments when definitions and the privileges of whiteness were being hotly contested. What the popular culture archive highlights is that, contrary to other claims, Miami’s black population was very much on the mind of the Cuban community in these early years.15
Negros y Locas
Cubans arriving in South Florida