[5] Alvarez Guedes was born in Unión de Reyes, Matanzas, a town from where, according to a popular song, hails a legendary and probably fictional rumba king called Malanga.
In a city known for its nightclub scene, Alvarez Guedes appeared in popular television shows that were set in bars and clubs in the role of el borracho, the drunkard, where he mixed linguistic humor with a physical comic style reminiscent of American silent movie stars like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
He worked in this medium, as well as the booming club world of 1950s Havana, where he shared billing with such stars as Beny Moré, Olga Guillot and Rita Montaner.
He routinely expressed his desire for Cuba to return to the way it used to be; such was the occasion when he made one of his famous jokes, involving a TWA flight he supposedly took between Havana and Miami.
In his How to Defend Yourself from the Cubans, which was released in the mid '80s, Alvarez Guedes routines are spoken in heavily accented English – and incongruously American-accented Spanish.
In the album, Alvarez Guedes warns Americans in a tongue-in-cheek manner about the Cuban invasion of United States homeland and culture.
But he did not do so transgressively, like a Lenny Bruce, but in the manner of American ethnic comics like the masters of Jewish shtick, as the natural expression of a people.
And his attitude is rooted in choteo, a disregard for any seriousness that Cuban intellectual life identifies as a major component of the island's culture.
But such academic wonderings would be dismissed by Alvarez Guedes, who in his radio show on Miami's Clasica 92.3FM would urge his listeners, in the best tradition of choteo, to tirarlo todo a relajo — make a joke of everything.
[7] Alvarez Guedes and his brother Rafael, together with composer/band leader Ernesto Duarte Brito, founded Gema Records, the company that launched the international careers of "El Gran Combo", a Puerto Rican Salsa music group.