Diversión contends that our understanding of the Cuban diaspora is lacking not in seriousness, but in play. Against the melancholia, anger, and pain that have defined dominant characterizations of Cuban America, Laguna provides an affective complement for understanding this community by insisting on the centrality of ludic popular culture for a diaspora that has completely transformed in the last twenty-five years. The majority of Cuban America is now made up of arrivals since the 1990s and the US-born generation—two segments that have received little attention in cultural studies scholarship. Diversión examines these generational shifts and tensions through readings of a wide range of playful popular culture forms originating in Miami and Cuba from the 1970s through the 2010s. These include the standup of comedians like Guillermo Alvarez Guedes and Robertico, festivals like Cuba Nostalgia, a form of media distribution on the island called el paquete, and the viral social media content of Los Pichy Boys. By unpacking this archive, Laguna explores our complex, often fraught attachments to popular culture and the way it can challenge and reify normative ideologies—especially in relation to politics and race. Transnational in his approach, Laguna argues that this at times ephemeral archive of diversión is crucial for understanding not only the diaspora, but increasingly, life on the island.

The introduction sets up two of the book’s primary objectives. First, it establishes the concept of diversión as a necessary affective complement to Cuban American Studies and Latina/o Studies more broadly in its emphasis on the vital role of laughter and play in quotidian life. Diversión is both a popular culture form and a means to describe its enactment—the performative repertoire of cubanía captured in gesticulation, word choice, tone, and speech patterns. Instead of focusing solely on the pain, anger, and sadness usually used to describe the Cuban diaspora in the United States, the introduction lays out the critical possibilities in ludic popular culture forms like standup comedy, festivals, television, and social media. Also included is a discussion of how diversión can be a means to reify and challenge normative discourse around race and sexuality. Second, it details how the Cuban diaspora has undergone massive demographic, political, and generational shifts since the 1990s and how the concept of diversión is especially useful for understanding these changes. Though the book focuses primarily on the twenty-first century, the introduction details an extensive archive of Cuban diasporic diversión extending back to the late nineteenth century.

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