#Was roger guedes bullied how to#
#Was roger guedes bullied free#

#Was roger guedes bullied how to#

Of his many albums, my favorite was his 14th recording, the aforementioned How to Defend Yourself From the Cubans. He toggled masterfully between Spanish and English in midjoke. Guillermo Álvarez Guedes was a genius at code-switching between American culture and Cuban culture. A challenge that was as real for Álvarez Guedes himself as it was for every member of his Cuban audience in Miami - including me. 'He made the audience think about the challenges associated with being in between two cultures and two languages,' says de la Campa. His jokes, de la Campa says, were structured like short stories. He was the first mainstream Cuban comic to incorporate profanity. It's a label Álvarez Guedes would have likely hated given his feelings about the Cuban Revolution. It was profane, but much of it was not crass.Ī 'cultural revolutionary' is how University of Pennsylvania professor Román de la Campa describes Álvarez Guedes.

#Was roger guedes bullied free#

And it was OK to laugh.'Īccording to University of Buffalo linguistics professor Jorge Guitart, Alvarez Guedes' implicit message to his audience was, 'You can't be free in Cuba, but you can be free here in America and say 'F - you.'' It was foul language in the service of binding Cubans in exile more closely together. way cool for those of us who didn't have access to Cuban culture.' Alfaraz has shared the same recordings with her teenage son and says, 'It is humor, it is not really profanity. At some deep level, he made being Cuban cool. 'We all listened to Álvarez Guedes swear up a storm. Alfaraz remembers sitting with her parents and their Cuban friends. She grew up far from Miami, and her family home served as a de facto hub for Cubans in western Michigan. Michigan State University linguist Gabriela Alfaraz had a similar experience. (This was the stage of my youth when she would talk to me in Spanish and I would respond in English.) Listening together to Álvarez Guedes was one way to transmit Cuban culture in the form of humor that a young teenage boy could embrace. At the time, I struggled to follow the Cuban slang. I must have been close to 13 years old when my prim, proper and judgmental mother from Camagüey would sit and listen to his recordings with me. (Listen to some of his jokes now, and it is impossible to avoid a clear impression of homophobia.) By Cuban standards 30 years ago, his jokes were PG-13. But Álvarez Guedes certainly told many jokes at the expense of gays and used 'maricón,' an anti-gay slur, as a punch line.

I don't remember many of Álvarez Guedes' jokes being raunchy a la Redd Foxx. We can discuss particulars in the comments, if you like. Good luck making sense of the jokes, if you don't understand Spanish. The video is NSFW, if your colleagues or boss speak Spanish.