Cuban Choteo: How Humor Became Cuba's National Identity

If there’s one thing that defines Cubans beyond the music, the coffee, and the baseball, it’s their humor. Not just any humor, but one with its own name: choteo. That innate ability to mock everything — authority, misfortune, even themselves — is perhaps the most defining trait of Cuban national identity.

Jorge Mañach and the anatomy of choteo

In 1928, Cuban intellectual Jorge Mañach delivered a lecture that would become a foundational text of Cuban identity: Indagación del choteo (An Inquiry into Choteo). For Mañach, choteo wasn’t simple mockery. It was an existential attitude, a stubborn refusal to take anything seriously, especially authority.

Mañach identified choteo as a “habit of disrespect” born from colonial conditions. The Cuban, subjected for centuries to a power they didn’t choose, developed humor as a survival mechanism. Laughing at the master was the first form of freedom.

What distinguishes choteo from other forms of humor is its leveling function: it doesn’t seek to destroy the other, but to bring everyone down to the same human plane. It’s democratic by nature.

The golden age: Cuban radio

If choteo is the spirit, Cuban radio of the 1940s and 50s was its temple. Havana became the capital of Latin American radio comedy, with the Radiocentro CMQ building as the epicenter of a humor empire.

La Tremenda Corte (1942-1961)

Without question, the most legendary show. La Tremenda Corte (The Tremendous Court) featured a madcap courtroom where José Candelario Tres Patines (Leopoldo Fernández) appeared episode after episode before an exasperated judge (Aníbal de Mar) on the most absurd charges.

The genius of the show, written by Spanish-born naturalized Cuban Cástor Vispo, lay in its linguistic play. Tres Patines was a master of puns, double meanings, and verbal manipulation. Each episode was a masterclass in Cuban Spanish, never once resorting to vulgarity.

What’s extraordinary is its endurance: more than 80 years later, La Tremenda Corte still airs on radio across Latin America and has millions of plays on digital platforms. It is arguably the most successful radio comedy in the history of the Spanish language.

Pototo and Filomeno

Before Tres Patines, the duo of Pototo and Filomeno (Leopoldo Fernández and Aníbal de Mar — the same actors) had already conquered Cuban radio. Created by producer Álvaro de Villa, these characters established the verbal comedy model that would define the Cuban humor tradition.

Alegrías de Sobremesa

Radio Progreso, “The Wave of Joy,” broadcast Alegrías de Sobremesa for decades — another pillar of Cuban radio humor that combined comedy sketches with live music, cementing the idea that in Cuba, humor and music are inseparable.

Álvarez Guedes: from choteo to stand-up

If La Tremenda Corte was the pinnacle of radio comedy, Guillermo Álvarez Guedes (1927-2013) took Cuban choteo to the stages of exile. With over 30 recorded albums, Álvarez Guedes became the most prolific Hispanic comedian of his generation.

His style was pure distilled choteo: everyday stories elevated to the absurd, observations about Cuban life — on the island and beyond — and a philosophy summed up in his favorite phrase: “Tirarlo todo a relajo!” (Make a joke of everything!)

From his show on Miami’s Clásica 92.3 FM, Álvarez Guedes became the voice of a generation that used humor to process the trauma of exile. His monologues about the differences between Cubans and Americans are genre classics.

Humor as resistance: from the Special Period to today

The Special Period of the 1990s proved that choteo was no relic of the past. When Cuba faced its worst economic crisis, Cubans responded with a flood of jokes that swept the island from end to end.

Those jokes — about blackouts, impossible transportation, nonexistent food — fulfilled exactly the function Mañach had described: desacralizing power and making the intolerable bearable. Humor didn’t solve hunger, but it preserved dignity.

In contemporary Cuba, comedians like Ulises Toirac and Carlos Otero keep the tradition alive. In 1998, Toirac starred in a television tribute to La Tremenda Corte on the show ¿Y tú de qué te ríes?, proving that Tres Patines remains the obligatory reference point for Cuban humor.

Choteo in the diaspora

Cuban humor traveled with the emigrants. In Miami, in Madrid, in Mexico City — wherever there are Cubans, there is choteo. It’s perhaps Cuba’s most portable cultural heritage: it needs no instruments, no stage, no official permission.

The tradition continues in podcasts, social media, and live shows. Platforms like YouTube and Spotify have given new life to classic La Tremenda Corte recordings, connecting generations who never knew the original Cuban radio with the genius of Tres Patines.

Why choteo matters

Choteo isn’t just entertainment. It’s a philosophy of life and a mechanism of cultural resistance that has accompanied the Cuban people for over a century. As scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat wrote, choteo is “the Cuban response to the solemnity of power.”

In a world that often demands seriousness, choteo reminds us that laughter is an act of freedom. And Cubans, like few other peoples, have known how to exercise that freedom even in the most difficult circumstances.

From the airwaves of Radiocentro CMQ to the memes circulating on WhatsApp today, choteo lives on. As long as there’s a Cuban who wants to laugh — that is to say, always — this tradition will never die.

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Want to explore more Cuban cultural traditions? Discover Cuban rumba, dominoes as a national tradition, and the Parrandas of Remedios.