What if America, and Miami, had turned away Cuban immigrant Desi Arnaz? | Opinion
Ninety-one years ago this spring, a penniless 17-year-old Cuban refugee arrived in Miami to join his father, who had fled during the revolution that overthrew President Gerardo Machado the year before.
In the Miami of 1934, father and son lived in a warehouse on Southwest Third Avenue off Flagler Street, where they battled rats and eked out a living selling roof tiles and cleaning canary birdcages. In what was still a sleepy Southern town, the immigrant’s English was so poor that when he tried to order dinner in a restaurant, he wound up with four bowls of soup — and nothing else.
The immigrant was Desi Arnaz and soon enough, with a beat-up $5 guitar he bought at a pawn shop, he reinvented himself as a musician. In a little nightclub on Park Avenue in a Miami Beach area then known as “Rum Row,” he helped introduce the conga dance craze to America, and the next thing he knew, he was starring on Broadway and headed to Hollywood, where he met an actress named Lucille Ball — and made history.
At a time in our national life when immigrants are still fleeing political turmoil in Latin America and hoping for a better life — and the Trump administration is doing everything it can to turn them away — would America still welcome a Desi Arnaz?
Sadly, I’m not so sure. But it would be our loss if we did not.
That’s because Arnaz not only went on to become Ricky Ricardo, the beloved husband and father on “I Love Lucy” — for most of the 1950s, the No. 1 show on TV — but also a pioneering entertainment mogul who changed the way television is made.
By deciding to film “Lucy” in front of a studio audience — instead of just beaming it on a live signal that disappeared — Arnaz and the team of experts he hired invented the re-run, which made possible syndication sales and the whole modern business model of television.
To this day, as the former head of Desilu Productions, he remains arguably the most powerful Latino studio executive in Hollywood history.
Along the way, he did something just as important: Arnaz proved to a skeptical CBS network and potential sponsors that a mass audience would accept him, a Cuban, as the loving partner of an all-American red-headed Anglo wife like Lucy.
And while he spoke with a funny accent and sometimes lost his temper in fusillades of furious Spanish at Lucy’s harebrained schemes, he never demeaned his real-life stature as a proud, talented Latino man who became a naturalized citizen and served his country in World War II.
“In real life or fiction, neither Desi nor Ricky ever betrayed his Latino identity,” New York Daily News columnist Miguel Perez wrote on Arnaz’s death in 1986.
Arnaz had originally arrived in Florida without the required immigration papers, and one day an immigration officer told him it was illegal for him to be working in his first band. Instead of holding him for deportation, the sympathetic officer gave Arnaz three months to get his papers in order and return to Cuba and apply for permanent U.S. residency, which he did. “It shows you that there are some nice people in this world,” Arnaz recalled in his 1986 memoir.
At a time when too many political leaders are eager to demonize immigrants, it’s worth remembering the heartfelt words of Arnaz himself, when the TV host Ed Sullivan honored “I Love Lucy” in 1954.
“From cleaning canary cages to this night here in New York is a long ways,” Arnaz said, struggling to control his emotions. “And I don’t think there’s any other country in the world that would give you that opportunity. I want to say thank you. Thank you, America. Thank you.”
Todd S. Purdum is a longtime journalist for The New York Times, Vanity Fair and other publications, and the author of “Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.“ He will be at a book signing and conversation from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday, June 21, at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables. Click here to reserve a seat.
This story was originally published June 18, 2025 at 3:22 PM.