In 1949 the Cuban dramatist Virgilio Piñera published what is considered the first play of the new theatre of the absurd in Spanish America, Farsa alarma. Terry Palls reminds us that the publication of this play in the journal Orígenes (vols. 21-22) predates the eventually prestigious European absurd theatre of Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco (26).

Since I later allude to Matías Montes Huidobro's Persona: Vida y máscara en el teatro cubano, but most of my quotations are from his book Persona: Vida y máscara en el teatro puertorriqueño, I will identify them in parentheses with the last part of their respective titles: Teatro cubano and Teatro puertorriqueño.

The antidoctrinal stance of the prerevolutionary absurdist theatre is one of the reasons the Cuban literary revolutionary establishment rejected the theatre of the absurd and considered it suspicious (Montes Huidobro, Teatro puertorriqueño 455-56).

While Zalacaín underscores Carnaval afuera's self-referentiality, he also recognizes the political stands of the play as he decodes its allegorical plot: «Little by little, the Puerto Rican has sold everything that identified him with his reality in exchange for cement and the machine..., sacrificing his innocence, his art, and his liberty for material benefits» («René Marqués» 36-37). One should also stress that Carnaval afuera's double ending reflects the supposed conclusion of the farce that has been represented, but not the actual end of the play. Both Tía Matilde and Ángel acknowledge that, after the actors and audience leave the theatrical illusion and the theatre, they are walking into another farcical reality, that of a carnivalesque and senseless country:

ÁNGEL.- ...The farce has ended! (He open his eyes and realizes that he is in front of the audience. Slowly he puts down his arms, bitter.) But...! Yes, yes, I should have imagined it. You. For you, out there, the carnival continues. (He smiles weakly.) Always that carnival of yours! (He laughs heartily.)

(III:128)

Tía Matilde closes the (second) play saying: «Let us all be humbugs and hypocrites, like them! Bow, actors! Bow!» (III:130).

Montes Huidobro, who notes that Carnaval afuera was initially rejected for representation in Puerto Rico for political reasons and was premièred in Havana in 1962 clarifies: «The exaggerated caricaturization of the Cuban exile was appropriate for a pro-Castro audience, although in stylistic terms it arrived at an inadequate moment, since the climax of the Cuban theatre of the absurd had already vanished» (Teatro puertorriqueño 454-55). Montes Huidobro then adds that during the Revolution the Cuban absurd theatre lost significant terrain and became quite suspect, since it did not reflect the objectives of the new social, political, and economic movement (Teatro puertorriqueño 456). See Palls 27 and Holzapfel 40.

Several important studies that address the distinction between the development, antecedents, and major exponents of the European theatre of the absurd and the Latin American expression, and that address the existential and social preocupations of the former vs. the politically oriented aspects of the latter, are Daniel Zalacaín, Teatro absurdista hispanoamericano (1985; see also «René Marqués, del absurdo a la realidad», 1978), and Raquel Aguilú de Murphy, Los textos dramáticos de Virgilio Piñera y el teatro del absurdo (1989). Zalacaín suggests that for René Marqués «reality is chaotic only in so far as the supremacy of the United States over Puerto Rico continues; once this influence ceases, reality would offer hope», and then he adds, «Marqués always deals with the absurd in terms of Puerto Rico's sociopolitical reality» («René Marqués» 35, 36; also Teatro absurdista 79). Tamara Holzapfel, in «Evolutionary Tendencies in Spanish American Absurd Theatre» (1980), identifies the absurd theatre as «diverse and unprogrammatic», stressing in this way its multiple manifestations and the various directions that this theatre has followed (see 37). Holzapfel adds that «it is increasingly meaningless to distinguish between socially committed and avant-garde dramatists» (37).

In his analysis of Triana's La noche de los asesinos, Eduardo Lolo examines critics' emphasis on the ambiguity and plural meanings of the play, particularly as most of them discuss the historical space that La noche occupies and attempts to recreate (35-37). At a primary level, Lolo supports the view that La noche de los asesinos portrays the end of the 1950s and the first part of the 1960s, and not Batista's Cuba from 1952 to 1958. But by the end of Lolo's essay, the opposing critical positions regarding the historical space are less explicit than was previously suggested: «[I]t is now evident for me that the promoters of both interpretations were exaggerating their respective endorsements. I don't deny the logic of their differentiating characteristics, but I question their excluding features» (43). Lolo believes that if La noche had been written during the 1950s, the young people oppressed by the Batista government would have interpreted the play in a fashion similar to that of the oppressed youngsters under Castro's regime ten years later. For Lolo, both the parents and the children in Triana's La noche are the same characters, extracted from different periods and juxtaposed within the fictional time of the play: «[T]hey were, in other words, the oppressed youngsters of the 50s confronted with their own image as oppressors in the 60s... There is no dichotomy in La noche de los asesinos, but juxtaposition; no ambivalence, but synthesis. A synthesis that, to escape from Castro's censorship, disguises itself as ambiguity, but whose end result has been universality» (44).

Regarding the origins of the Cuban buffo, José A. Escarpenter and José A. Madrigal comment: «On Sunday, May 31st, 1868 the Bufos habaneros theatre company makes its first appearance in the Teatro Villanueva in Havana, an event that will mark the starting point of a new mode of Cuban popular theatre» (15). Escarpenter and Madrigal add: «The titles and some of the texts that have survived display four main trends in buffo genre: the parodic vein, the campesina (or peasant style), the catedrática (which parodied intellectual pretensions), and the costumbrista (or comedy of manners)» (16). One can see that the origins of the Cuban buffo in 1868 forces us to think of the political events of that year. The Grito de Yara of 1868, which began with the planters of the east rising against Spain (Thomas 245), had, as one of its concerns, the abolition of slavery, but as it turn out this subject could not be addressed immediately, and it was not until 1882 that slavery was finally abolished in Cuba.

Not surprisingly, the Cuban choteo can be closely linked to the contradictions and excesses of Revolico. As defined by Jorge Mañach and glossed by Pérez Firmat, the choteo exemplifies the persistent dichotomy evident in Cuba's history and in the Cuban sense of humor: «No matter what the angle of approach to choteo, and there are many -etymology, psychological causes, environmental influences, social consequences- Mañach proceeds by first making distinctions and subsequently placing choteo on both ends of the dichotomy. One major example: much of Indagación is given over to a discussion of whether choteo is pernicious or salutary; after weighing both alternatives, however, Mañach concludes that it is both» (Pérez Firmat 54).

«El choteo es un prurito de independencia que se exterioriza en una burla de toda forma no imperativa de autoridad» (Mañach, 1928, 41). I use Pérez Firmat's translation of Mañach's defintion of choteo (56).