Trespatines Radio has a single, unusual mission: play episodes of one radio comedy show, without interruption, forever. That show is La Tremenda Corte, which aired from Havana's Radiocentro CMQ Building from 1942 to 1961 and became one of the defining programs of Latin American radio's golden age.
The premise was a courtroom, mostly imaginary and always chaotic. José Candelario, better known by his nickname Tres Patines, appeared as a defendant week after week, talking his way through absurd charges of theft and deception using nothing but linguistic wordplay and deliberately convenient misunderstandings. He faced off against a hypochondriac judge, played opposite frequent complainants Nananina and Rudecindo, and the whole format ran on scripts written by Cástor Vispo, a Spanish-born writer who became a Cuban citizen and built the show's humor around Cuban folk psychology and regional dialect.
The Comedian Who Built the Character
Leopoldo Fernández played Tres Patines, bringing chemistry he had already developed with Aníbal de Mar, who played the judge, from their earlier comedy double act Pototo y Filomeno. That existing rapport is part of why the show clicked so quickly. It launched on CMQ Radio on January 7, 1942, after a brief run on rival station RHC Cadena Azul, and went on to be heard well beyond Cuba, reaching audiences across the Caribbean, Central America and parts of Mexico during its nineteen year run.
Silenced in Havana, Revived Everywhere Else
The original run ended abruptly in October 1960, when Cuba's revolutionary government seized the CMQ Circuit and Radiocentro, folding the network into state media and canceling its comedy programming in the process. The format did not die with it. New versions ran in Mexico between 1966 and 1969 and later in Peru, and to this day La Tremenda Corte remains one of the most widely referenced radio comedies across Latin America and its diaspora communities. Trespatines Radio exists entirely for that audience, running the surviving recordings back to back for listeners who grew up on Tres Patines' courtroom antics or are discovering them for the first time.