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Comedians from Cuba

The comedian directory for Cuba: profiles, bios, photos and social links.

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Alexis Valdés

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Alexis Valdés is a Cuban comedian, actor, filmmaker, monologuist, screenwriter, producer, poet and songwriter whose career has taken him from Havana to Spain and on to Miami. He was born in Havana on 16 August 1963, the son of a teacher and the Cuban comic actor Leonel Valdés. He graduated in engineering, but acting won out, and he worked as an actor in Cuba for ten years, with screen roles that included María Antonia (1991) and El siglo de las luces (1992). In the 1990s he settled in Spain, where he became widely known through his monologues on El club de la comedia (2000–2004). Spanish television kept him busy in those years, with appearances in El comisario and Ellas son así (1999), Humor se escribe con H, La primera noche, Casi todo a cien and La vuelta al mando (2000–2001), Un paso adelante (2003), El inquilino (2004), the sitcom Casi perfectos (2004–2005) and Aída (2005). In film he appeared in París-Tombuctú (1999), Salsa and Tatawo (2000), Torrente 2: Misión en Marbella, Tuno negro and Clara y Elena (2001), El oro de Moscú (2003) and 90 millas (2005), and he voiced characters in the Spanish versions of Madagascar and Surf's Up. In 2005 he acted in, directed and produced his first feature film, Un rey en La Habana. He later moved to Miami, where he produces and presents late-night shows. Until December 2012 he hosted the comedy talk show Esta noche tu night on Mega TV, welcoming major musicians and comedians as guests and playing Cristinito, one of the best-loved characters of his career, and he went on to present Seguro que Yes. He also writes and produces stage plays, and has started a professional music career with the single El Cariñito. In 2020 he wrote the poem Esperanza, which had a wide impact across the Spanish-speaking world, and in 2022 he published El miedo nos hizo fuertes, a memoir of his hard childhood. His more recent screen work includes Arrobá (2013), Olmos y Robles and Sopa de gansos (2015), Las Campos (2018) and HBO's White House Plumbers (2023).

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Alvarez Guedes

Guillermo Álvarez Guedes, known across Latin America simply as Álvarez Guedes, was a Cuban comedian, actor, writer and businessman, regarded as one of the most influential Spanish-language comedians of all time and one of the pioneers of stand-up comedy in Latin America. He was born on 8 June 1927 in Unión de Reyes, Matanzas province, where as a small child he was already performing at the local theatre and entertaining crowds at parties and fairs with songs and dances. As a teenager he earned his living in travelling circuses. He moved to Havana and worked in theatre and radio, where in 1949 he was dramatising street crimes. Comedy came when the producer Gaspar Pumarejo brought him to television, the new medium in which Cuba was a Latin American pioneer. He played in farces, adventures, comedies and musicals, and his weekly role as el borracho, the drunk, on CMQ's Casino de la Alegría made him an icon for Cubans. His style mixed wordplay with a physical comedy reminiscent of Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He paired with the singer and actress Rita Montaner and shared bills in 1950s Havana's clubs with stars such as Beny Moré and Olga Guillot. He also began a film career that ran to more than 14 films, among them Thief in Silk (1953), The Big Boodle (1957), Dios te salve, psiquiatra (1966), A mí qué me importa que explote Miami (1976) and La chica del alacrán de oro (1990), three of which he produced. In 1957 he co-founded the record label GEMA with the pianist Ernesto Duarte Brito and his brother Rafael. In 1960 he went into exile, first to New York and then to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where with his brother he continued Gema Records, which helped launch El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico internationally. His first comedy album appeared in 1973, and more than thirty followed. Those recordings, full of Cuban idioms and street humour delivered deadpan, made him an international star of Spanish-language comedy. His trademark was the Cuban exclamation ¡ñó!, and he is often credited with breaking the vulgarity barrier in Spanish stand-up, not to shock but simply by talking the way Cubans talk. His humour drew on teatro bufo, the Cuban music-hall tradition of comic types from the Havana barrios, and on his longing for the Cuba he had left. He wrote more than twenty books of humour, and until 2011 hosted a three-hour show on Miami's Clásica 92.3 FM, one of the most popular programmes on Spanish-language radio in South Florida. Álvarez Guedes died at his home in Kendall, Florida, on 30 July 2013, aged 86.

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Aníbal de Mar

Aníbal de Mar, born Evaristo Simón Domínguez, was a Cuban comic actor best remembered as El Tremendo Juez, the long-suffering judge of the radio and television comedy La tremenda corte, which is still broadcast on radio stations across Latin America and sold on CD, VHS and DVD. He was born on 26 October in Yateras, in Guantánamo province in the east of Cuba. He began his career in 1934, working in theatres all over the island. He had a gift for playing several characters at once: in a show in Santiago de Cuba he played both Don Pancracio and his son Felipito, an act that later reached the screen in the film Una aventura peligrosa (1939). In 1934 he also became the Chinese detective Chan Li Po in the radio serial of that name by Félix B. Caignet, later the author of the famous radio soap El derecho de nacer. It was one of the first big radio hits in Cuba, and in 1937 it became La serpiente roja, the first Cuban sound film, with Pituka de Foronda and Carlos Badías, directed by Ernesto Caparrós. From 1941 he worked with Leopoldo Fernández, with De Mar as Filomeno and Fernández as Pototo in the radio and later television duo Pototo y Filomeno. Their most lasting creation was La tremenda corte, launched in the early 1940s, in which De Mar's exasperated judge faced Fernández's incorrigible José Candelario Tres Patines. Over the years he worked on many Cuban stations, including CMKD and CMKC in Santiago de Cuba and CMQ, COCO and RHC in Havana. His other films include Romance musical, with Otto Sirgo, Rosita Fornés and Rita Montaner among the cast, Hitler soy yo with Adolfo Otero and Julito Díaz, Música, mujeres y piratas, Hotel de muchachas and ¡Olé, Cuba!. In 1947 he dubbed the Chinese character into Spanish in the MGM film Little Mister Jim in New York. Aníbal de Mar died in Miami on 22 February 1980.

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Leopoldo Fernández

Leopoldo Fernández, known on stage as Pototo and to millions of listeners as Tres Patines, was a Cuban actor, singer and comedian, considered one of the most influential Spanish-language humorists of the twentieth century. He was born Leopoldo Augusto Fernández Salgado on 26 December 1904 in Matanzas province and grew up in Güines in a humble family; his father was a tobacco worker. He left school young to help support his family, delivering bread and working as a telegraphist, cigar maker and fortune-teller, until in 1926 he founded his own theatre company with friends. That year he also toured Cuba with Blanquita Gómez, and through the 1930s he became established on the island's theatre circuit. Mass stardom came in the early 1940s, when the radio network Cadena Azul hired him and Aníbal de Mar for a new programme. The Spanish writer Cástor Vispo created the scripts and characters of La tremenda corte, launched in 1941, in which Fernández played José Candelario Tres Patines, a small-time rogue forever in trouble with De Mar's judge. Its success was immediate, it was heard daily as far away as Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Panama and the Dominican Republic, and it is still broadcast today. Fernández said many characters were drawn from real Cuban types. On stage he and De Mar were also the duo Pototo y Filomeno, and Fernández formed a celebrated partnership with the actress Mimí Cal as Nananina. He appeared in the films Hotel de muchachas (1951) and ¡Olé, Cuba! (1957) and recorded comedy albums. He kept working in Cuba after 1959; by March 1962 his company had played 70 weeks in a row at Havana's Teatro Nacional. That April a performance was broken up, his theatre was closed, and later that year he left Cuba with 1,170 refugees on the cargo ship Shirley Lykes. He always denied the popular story that a joke about hanging a portrait had sent him to prison. In exile he worked in Mexico, recording the album Tres Patines y El Señor Juez with De Mar in 1968, and in Peru, where in 1969 he starred in the Panamericana Televisión series El Guardia Tres Patines with Antonio Salim. In Puerto Rico he met the actress Vilma Carbia, his second wife. In 1971 he settled in Miami. In 1976 he launched the radio show Los Problemas de Trespatines, with Carbia as his wife, heard on stations across the United States; in 1977 his company played five months at Hialeah's Teatro Lecuona; and in 1980 he returned to film with Misión 3K3, co-directed with his son Polito. His last stage season, Pototo odia a las mujeres, ran until October 1984. He never received royalties for the endless rebroadcasts of his work. Leopoldo Fernández died in Miami on 11 November 1985, and Cuban soil was placed on his coffin.

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