After the rapprochement between the US and Cuba, this book updates the conversation about Cuban America by showing how this community has changed over the past 25 years. No longer a conservative Republican voting bloc, the majority of Cubans today want more engagement with the island instead of less. Albert Sergio Laguna investigates the generational shifts and tensions in a Cuban America where the majority is now made up of immigrants who arrived since the 1990s and those born in the US.To probe these changes, Laguna examines the aesthetic and social logics of a wide range of popular culture forms originating in Miami and Cuba from the 1970s through the 2010s.
By unpacking this archive, Laguna explores our complex, often fraught attachments to popular culture and the way it can challenge and reproduce typical cultural ideologies—especially in relation to politics and race. In the wake of the largest migration wave to the US in Cuban history, Diversión and its focus on play are crucial reading for those who seek to understand not only the Cuban diaspora, but cultural and economic life on the island.