Archive image of Abel Prieto, probably trying to explain a joke to Fidel Castro. / EFE
Censorship forced people to perfect their codes. The comedian learned to leave empty spaces, and the audience learned to fill them.
By Yunior García Aguilera (14ymedio)
HAVANA TIMES – There are books that age badly and officials who age even worse. Abel Prieto’s Misha’s Humor belongs to that rare category of texts that, thirty years later, end up explaining better precisely what their author intended to omit.
Originally published in 1997 and republished this August in Havana – for the deflated Book Fair – the essay examines political jokes in the former socialist bloc. Prieto traces jokes about the Kremlin, bureaucracy, shortages, leaders and everyday absurdity to demonstrate that humor had detected the decay of so-called real socialism long before political scientists did. The idea was not bad. What was bad was that it never occurred to him to apply it at home.
Because if jokes about Brezhnev served to measure the Soviets’ loss of faith, one would have to ask what the jokes circulating in Cuba today are saying. What does it mean that in a line, during a blackout or at a comedy show, a single word, a pause or a look is enough for hundreds of people to understand exactly what – and whom – is being talked about?
For years, Cuban humor has functioned as a kind of instant plebiscite. The comedian does not need to explain much. In fact, their survival instinct screams that they cannot even do so. It is enough to mention “the current situation,” “objective factors,” “the ordering process” or any other piece of official jargon for the audience to fill in the rest of the joke on its own.
That is precisely why the authorities have spent years trying to “guide” laughter. And the effort is almost touching. The official press publishes cartoons against Trump, the embargo, Miami, Marco Rubio and any external villain available in the catalog. They draw Uncle Sam with fangs, bags of dollars, bombs, a stars-and-stripes hat and an evil expression. The occasional comedian with a Party membership card insists that the chicken does not arrive because of the embargo. The audience watches and listens with indifference. And then laughs about something else.
The regime can order a hate rally, a march, a front page on the official newspaper Granma, or a tweet storm for their trolls. What it cannot order is a burst of laughter. The public knows perfectly well who the people are that have spent more than six decades promising a better future, while utopia runs away in terror whenever they mention it. And that is the profoundly subversive dimension of Cuban humor.
Censorship forced people to perfect their codes. The comedian learned to leave empty spaces, and the audience learned to fill them. A raised eyebrow could replace a name. A pause could stand in for an entire speech. The phrase “you know who” ended up being far more effective than any explicit denunciation.
That mechanism creates an instant community. In a packed theater, when the comedian brushes against the limit and the audience erupts, something politically powerful happens: hundreds of people discover at the same time that they are not alone in what they think.
That is why programs such as Sabadazo, Deja que yo te cuente or Vivir del cuento became, for years, some of the most political spaces on Cuban television. Their characters did not need to mention the Central Committee: all they had to do was try to survive and let reality do the rest. Perhaps it is no coincidence that television programming has become so serious today. Maybe programming, too, received its instructions.
Cuban humor also possesses a democratic cruelty that Abel Prieto seems to have understood perfectly in Moscow, but not in Havana. It laughs at the bureaucrat, the leader who talks too much, the incompetent official, the boss who explains failure with increasingly longer words. And Prieto himself belongs entirely to that same fauna.
The former cultural minister and former Government adviser has spent years worrying about “cultural colonization,” about Beyonce, Shakira, Sylvester Stallone and the mechanisms through which imperialism supposedly organizes our desires. Yet he himself seems condemned to orbit around a Soviet metropolis that no longer exists. His very long novel Viajes de Miguel Luna also suffers from that Sputnik syndrome: it goes round and round without managing to escape Moscow’s gravitational pull. Cubans, on the other hand, do not need Hollywood to explain whom to laugh at when they hear a speech by Díaz-Canel.
Cuban reality produces absurdity at an industrial pace. Perhaps that is why the republication of Misha’s Humor is so revealing. Everything Prieto detected in Moscow – and more – is happening in Cuba today. Only now Misha could be La Machi (the president’s wife) And Havana is much closer to Prieto than the Kremlin, even if he keeps looking toward Moscow.
Translated by Regina Anavy for Translating Cuba.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.