APRIL 26, 1999
By DANA CALVO, Sun-Sentinel, April 25
HAVANA -- Cubans are hungry. Their spirits are low. But their situation apparently makes for roaring comedy.
Cuban stand-up comics are getting big laughs with monologues about the monotony of communist life and a dying economy. President Fidel Castro, long known for squelching public criticism with harsh punishments, appears to be permitting guffaws at his regime's expense.
The humor is endorsed and supported by a relatively new government agency with the straight-faced name: The Center to Promote Humor.
At about 1 a.m. on a recent weeknight, the most famous comedian in Cuba, Carlos Ruiz de la Tejera, rattled off a series of sketches about trying to make ends meet. The jokes were mildly entertaining for the tourists in the crowd. But they hit a nerve with the locals, electrifying them into hysterics.
In a bit about an old, religious woman who couldn't afford food at the market, Ruiz folded into a crouch and squinted up at heaven. "Saint of Onions, Saint of Meat, Saint of Strawberries, Saint of Bread, please, bless me!" he wailed into the microphone.
The locals cracked up, slapping their legs and stirring their watery Cuba Libres.
Ruiz pressed on.
In rapid-fire Spanish he took apart each trauma associated with travel in Cuba, where old cars don't run for lack of parts, buses carry300 people at a time and taxis refuse to stop for locals, even if they could afford the fare. Ruiz asked the crowd: "The worst person in this whole situation?" Still careful not to utter the feared name of President Fidel Castro, he paused. "It's that guy who steals bicycles. You know the one!"
Comics seem to be enjoying increasing freedom even as the government cracks down on journalists, dissidents and Cubans who speak out against the system. Many Cubans suspect Castro has allowed the sharp humor to gain momentum for two reasons: desperately needed dollars and psychological relief.
They suggest that he will put up with mild derision because seasoned comics bring in tourist dollars, performing at clubs that charge as much as a $10 cover -- the average Cuban's monthly income.
In addition, comics are helping with the country's mental housekeeping. Their jokes are a healthy, non-confrontational way to blow off steam during impossible economic times.
While U.S. comics yuk it up about current events and the president's sexual follies, Cuban comics try to cut through the censored headlines and propaganda speeches.
"You have to be a comic of the truth. People hear lies all day," said Ruiz. "We don't joke about sex as much as the Americans do, because it's more liberated here. People joke about what is oppressive."
Life for many on the island has become markedly worse since the beginning of the year. While an expanded police force has made the streets safer, massive arrests through neighborhoods placed countless Cubans on police rosters. A crackdown on the black market has crimped the flow of food and goods.
This is fodder for entertainment?
"Of course!" said Cary Brifon, artistic director for Dos Gardenias, one of the most popular restaurants and cabaret clubs in Havana. "The Cuban is a person, who, after the worst thing in the world has happened, we laugh."
Cuba was financially devastated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which shut down the flow of money from the former Soviet Union. Since 1991, Cuba's "special period" has made everything from petroleum to paper precious. For performers, it has meant that the lights in theaters were dead several nights each week and television stations could not restock their shelves with film or videotapes.
"The special period introduced humor about difficulty," said Enrique Lopez Oliva, a theologian who taught at the University of Havana prior to Castro's 1959 revolution. "Humor is a mechanism of defense for Cubans."
Brifon said comics have found their most effective medium in restaurants and theaters, where performances are untelevised and therefore not subject to the stricter censors of nationwide programming. They typically perform in front of small, live audiences.
"In theaters they can be spontaneous. It's something unplanned," said Marlene Leon, 38, a nurse who often goes to the restaurant across the street from her apartment to watch the twice weekly shows.
On a recent weeknight, Maria Magne, 32, waited for the doors of the Delirio Habanero Piano-Bar to open. "Here they can perform with more license," she said as she and her friend walked into a dark lobby with a stalled elevator and only two light bulbs. They trotted up four dark flights of stairs, where Ruiz was the finale. For $3, Magne and her friend drank rum and coke at one of the small round tables and watched the two-hour show.
Unlike Magne, who makes a living accessorizing clothes for well-heeled tourists and models visiting the island, most Cubans cannot afford club admission prices. But the government allows budding comics to practice improvisational routines at local museums, where admission prices are two to five pesos. Some day, those comics may make it to the big time, joining the 100-member roster at the Center to Promote Humor.
The center, which opened in 1995, spreads the word about performances and mediates disputes between club administrators and performers. Ruiz and his colleagues at the center benefited from a February resolution that ordered clubs to pay the center 50 percent of the ticket sales in dollars. That money is split between the center and the comic.
Former comedian Emmanuel Sabater Diaz remembers getting paid in pesos for performances that were pre-screened the night before by government censors. Sabater defected in 1991, but he keeps up on the latest comedy from friends still on the island."The comics now aren't as afraid as we were," he said from his home in Santo Domingo. "They have more liberty. They are performing during a time when (the government) is increasing the freedoms of all artists."
Sabater said good comedy is able to penetrate Cuba's "officialspeak" and propaganda. "The artists are realizing that their reality isn't real at all, that reality exists outside of Cuba," he said.
But this is still a communist country, where those suspected of organizing against the government can be jailed for years. Comics still walk a delicate line, said Rolando Rodriguez, spokesman for the Center to Promote Humor. "You don't attack a specific person," he said, without mentioning Castro. "You can, however, make fun of the concept of what they've done."
But Brifon said most comics self-censor before they ever get in front of a microphone. "It can be humor," she said with one eyebrow raised. "It can't be opposition."
Dana Calvo is a Sun-Sentinel staff writer. You reach her at dcalvo@sun-sentinel.com or call 305-810-5004.
Copyright 1999, Sun-Sentinel Co. and South Florida Interactive, Inc.
[ BACK TO THE NEWS ]