Cuban theater in the early years of exile in Miami catered to the commercial tastes of a displaced audience looking for ways to stay connected to the homeland they left behind and imagined returning to very soon.  Comedies were among the undemanding entertainment this audience expected. Two popular theater genres in Cuba were sainetes, one-act comedy sketches, often with music, and “teatro bufo,” short comical sketches that included slapstick, blackface, music, and political commentary. Its stock characters imitated types (el negrito in blackface, el gallego- the Spaniard, la mulata, and so on). Dating back to the 19^th century, both are the longest ongoing theatrical tradition on the island and became the most popular type of theatrical recreation for decades on the island, well into the XXI century.  Radio, where the Latin American soup opera was established (with the 1948 broadcast of El derecho de nacer (The Right to Be Born), by Felix B. Caignet), gave way to the Television Play promoting the taste for slapstick humor and melodramatic comedies and dramas. They were both the most important sources of entertainment in pre-revolutionary Cuba and once some of its founders, promoters, and actors, were of paramount importance to the cultural formation of the community and the city when they arrived in Miami.

The first theatrical presentations were staged during intermissions in movie theaters that showed double features of films originally in Spanish or subtitled. Several movie houses in Miami included Spanish-language films in their schedule, such as the Teatro Radio Centro (previously the Flagler Theater), Trail, Tower, Lecuona and Hialeah (Essex) theaters.

1. Teatro Radio Centro
2. Hialeah Theater
3. Tower Theater
4. Trail Theater