Enrisco, Between Freedom and Power

From New Jersey, the Cuban writer, professor and humorist speaks to us of the divine aspect of making humanity laugh about the inhuman.

Today, Enrique del Risco is the writer who most profoundly and ironically analyses the intricacies of local politics in the last seven decades. / Eric del Risco

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Jorge Fernandez Era, Havana, 12 January 2025 — Pérdida y recuperación de la inocencia (Loss and Recovery of Innocence) is one of those books that change the perception of literature, humor, and the border that is often built between the two. It was published in 1994 by someone who was part of the humor movement that emerged in the eighties in Cuban universities. Today, Enrique del Risco is the writer who most deeply and ironically analyzes the intricacies of local politics in the last seven decades. This is supported by, among others, his book of articles El Comandante Ya Tiene Quien le Escriba (El Comandante Already Has Someone to Write to Him) (2003), the memoir Nuestra hambre en La Habana (Our Hunger in Havana ), the book of essays Historia y masoquismo (History and Masochism) (2023), as well as the anthologies El compañero que me atendi (El Compañero Who Looked After Me) (2017) and another on the way, where several intellectuals delve into the influences of perestroika and glasnost on Cuban thought at the end of the 20th century.

It was about time we called him up and sat down for a serious talk.

Jorge Fernandez Era/14ymedio: How does the weird balance between being funny and being boring work?

Enrique del Risco: It is a balance, and balances are always complicated. There is no unique or permanent recipe. In order not to fall into boredom, you have to avoid excesses and clichés, and surprise the spectator, which forces you to seek originality, even in the most hackneyed subjects. Above all, respect the public, think that they are as or more intelligent than you are,  treat them accordingly, know how to use complicity without abusing it. There will always be audiences that are dumber than you, but for them, comedians are not needed: they laugh at anything.

“If Fidel’s plane collides with Raúl’s plane, who will be saved? Answer: the people.” That’s pretty free, isn’t it?

Jorge Fernandez Era/14ymedio: After “Humor between Freedom and Power,” your iconic text from more than thirty years ago, which of the three of them has changed? Have you?

Enrique del Risco: Iconic, I don’t know for whom, but freedom and humor have changed somewhat, even if power remains in the same place. In that article I said that it was part of the logic of humor to confront power and snatch away spaces of freedom, without which humor cannot exist. I had in mind, on the one hand, a totalitarian power like the Cuban one and, on the other, the humor that is exercised in the public space.

In private, humor never ceased to be free. I remember the first political joke I heard: “If Fidel’s plane collides with Raúl’s plane, who will be saved? The answer: The people.” That’s free enough, isn’t it? Even if the Fidelista child I was at the time didn’t immediately get the joke.

Since 1994, when the article was published, Cuban humor has conquered wide spaces of freedom. It achieved this within the country, where those in power have had to resign themselves to seeing Mentepollo or Pánfilo appear on television with their Vivir del Cuento. Possibly the sweetest moment of humor in its relationship with those in power was when Obama, the first American president to visit Cuba in almost a century, preferred to go to the set of Vivir del Cuento rather than pay homage to Fidel Castro in Punto Cero.

That power has also had to resign itself to the fact that you continue writing even though you suffer firsthand from power’s poor sense of humor.

That power has also had to resign itself to the fact that you continue writing even though you suffer firsthand from power’s poor sense of humor. Others – I suppose with less of a hero’s vocation – have preferred to seek freedom outside the Island. I think of the legion that has been making humor for decades, such as Ramón Fernández Larrea, Pepe Pelayo, Alexis Valdés, El Pible, Garrincha or Lauzán, and the others that have joined in recent years. The best thing we have done is not use freedom as an excuse to fall into weightiness, which is ultimately as dangerous as power or more so for a comedian.

It helps a lot that digital technology has largely freed us from the condemnation that separates Cuban comedians into “inside” and “outside.” I remember, a couple of decades ago, seeing Jorge Bacallao reading his text about Havana. I thought about how good it would have been to keep a record of the shows at the Carlos Marx and the Mella in the late eighties and early nineties. Or of the readings by Eduardo del Llano, Pedro Lorenzo and myself at the Esperando por Gutenberg group in La Madriguera.

Today we can access what is happening inside: the La Risa por Delante space, the magnificent shows of the new version of La Leña del Humor… And from there you can also keep up to date with what we do here.

Jorge Fernandez Era/14ymedio: “El comandante has no one to write for him” and yet you do.

Enrique del Risco: I had not written humor for years when I took up my nom de guerre, Enrisco, again in 2000 to publish weekly columns in Cubaencuentro. Making humor out of Cuban politics was not well received, partly because in exile a solemn tone had been imposed when speaking of “poor Cuba, martyr of Castro-communism” and similar niceties, and partly because the humorists who came out of Cuba since the beginning of the Revolution imposed a “combative humor” that is a contradiction in itself. You can make fun of a dictatorship, make people lose the fear or respect it inspires, but from there to believing that you are a “soldier of laughter” or any other war metaphor is a very dangerous leap. The world of war and the allegories it engenders is full of rigidity, and this can only serve a humorist to make fun of it.

If by “Cuba” you don’t just mean the largest archipelago of the Antilles, but the regime that prevails there, that’s a bad joke.

The greatest merit of those columns of mine in Cubaencuentro – part of which ended up in the book Comandante Ya Tiene Quien le Escriba (El Comandante Already Has Someone Who Writes to Him) – together with the letters of Ramón Fernández Larrea and the apotheotic irruption of Lauzán with his Guamá, was to change the perception that political humor in exile should be as stiff as that in Cuba, only with Uncle Sam replaced by Fidel. If there was one thing that Castroism and anti-Castroism agreed on, it was that politics was a serious matter. As Woody Allen says, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” and we had lived in Cuba too long to realize that no matter how macabre the system was, at its core it was a farce.

Those of us who started making political humor wanted to be free not only as people, but also as comedians. That creative freedom we sought was reflected in what we did. In my case, it helped that I didn’t wait to leave Cuba to make political humor. At least as far as humor is concerned, when I left the Island I was already free.

Jorge Fernandez Era/14ymedio: It is an axiom that a joke cannot and should not be explained. Can Cuba be explained?

Enrique del Risco: From a geographical point of view, it is very easy. But if by “Cuba” you do not only mean the largest archipelago of the Antilles, but also the ruling regime – remember that in 1959 Fidel Castro had the idea of ​​offering “freedom with bread” – that is a bad joke, a bad joke that only succeeds in being taken seriously because of local vileness and foreign stupidity. Or vice versa.

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