A Cuban in Mayberry: Looking Back at America’s Hometown by Gustavo Pérez Firmat (review)

Expanding on the work of historians Richard Michael Kelly, Ken Beck and Jim Clark, and Joey Fann, A Cuban in May berry: Looking Back at America’s Hometown examines The Andy Griffith Show and why it remains culturally significant nearly fifty years after it went off the air. The author, Columbia University humanities professor Gustavo Pérez Firmat, approaches the program from both an autobiographical and an etymological perspective. As a scholar who has written extensively about his experience as a Cuban exile living in the United States, Pérez Firmat extends that experience to his interpretation of the show. Just as the author and his family were unwillingly torn from a happy life in Havana after the 1959 revolution, he perceives the same reticence toward change in the fictional denizens of Mayberry. Dividing his analysis of Andy Griffith between the show as a place and as a people, he draws connections between concepts outlined in the show and Cuban cultural constructs. In so doing, he demonstrates that although the show was purposefully rooted in a southern understanding of the world, its sense of insularity and struggle to maintain stasis in an evolving world are actually concepts that transcend time, ethnicity, and region.

Confirming a sentiment often expressed by Andy Griffith himself, Pérez Firmat makes a case that philia, or friendly love, and not familial or romantic love, was at the heart of the show. Mayberry is a closed, perennial society, and it is belonging to the town of Mayberry that makes one worth loving and protecting. All outsiders, regardless of their intentions, are perceived as a threat and driven out in some way or another, a phenomenon that the author describes as “community restoration by exclusion” (p. 39). The underlying theme of the show is the unspoken fear that one day things will change and never return to normal. In this respect, Pérez Firmat is on firm ground in drawing a connection between the values of the show and his own experience as a Cuban exile.

While the author periodically makes a significant connection between his own experiences and The Andy Griffith Show, this theme is not consistently followed throughout the book. Much like Richard Michael Kelly in his 1981 book on the program, Pérez Firmat focuses almost exclusively on the dynamics of the town of Mayberry and the interpersonal relationships in the show. He offers an excellent, detailed character study, determining how each character contributed to the philia-based community of Mayberry, but he does not connect this analysis to either the etymological or the autobiographical premises put forth in the early chapters of the book. This work offers a new take on a cherished old favorite, showing us the value of the program from a non-American perspective, but the author fails to weave that unique viewpoint into his analysis of the show’s specific elements.