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6 tHe seCret Life of riCky riCardo Somewhere around the end of 1957, Fidel Castro became the most famous living Cuban in the world. Before that, the title was held by a US show business celebrity costarring in the nation’s favorite TV comedy show, and doing so largely, it was assumed by most viewers, by playing himself as a Cuban. An immigrant singer and bandleader, he was a dark, charming, gorgeously handsome Latin male, with a square jaw, blazing white teeth, flashing eyes, gleaming hair, a volatile temperament, and a tendency, when excited, to comic mispronunciation. Some twenty-odd years after his arrival in the United States, he was famous as the husband of Lucille Ball, America’s favorite comedy actress, and her costar on the aforementioned comedy show, I Love Lucy. On the show he was known as Ricky Ricardo. Offstage he was known as Desi Arnaz. Those familiar with his show business background knew that he had enjoyed an earlier career in theater and movies and previous to that as a musical performer with Xavier Cugat before going on to found his own Latin orchestra. In Cuba, the homeland he left when he was sixteen, he was remembered as Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III, the celebrity son of a family of great social and political importance in the easternmost province of the island—with its city, Santiago de Cuba, so far from Havana as to be a grand and historical place with its own distinct life and culture. In his adoptive country, his rise to fame and fortune perhaps could not have seemed more an abstract or epitome of the immigrant dream. Having come here as a young political refugee, he served in the army in World War II, pursued a highly successful entertainment career in music, stage, and film, married a glamorous Hollywood star, parlayed the celebrity marriage into the most successful TV domestic situation comedy of the era, and grew rich as an entertainment business entrepreneur; he was an American success story. In the broadest sense this was true. For those who knew the complexities of Cuban identity then and now, in his secret soul he remained Cuban with personal and cultural dimensionalities no Secret Life of Ricky Ricardo 71 amount of fictionalized acquired identity could assuage. Ricky Ricardo was a Cuban created by mid-twentieth-century American TV. Desi Arnaz was a Cuban carrying together at once the mid-twentieth-century pride and sorrows of a complex Cuban-American history. There was a tremendous difference. What that came to humanly entail within the fabric of a life is the subject of this essay. An insightful 2008 feature profile by Liane Hansen of National Public Radio provides a set of working outlines. Ricky was from Havana; Desi was from Santiago. Ricky immigrated to New York; Desi to Miami. Ricky married Lucy McGillicuddy; Desi married Lucille Ball. Ricky’s wife wanted desperately to be in show business; Desi’s wife was already a successful radio and film actress. Ricky eventually owned a nightclub; Desi eventually owned television and movie studios. Ricky was from Havana. Few, if any, current viewers of reruns—after decades of embargo and travel prohibitions—would now know what that meant. During the 1951–57 period of the show’s greatest popularity, American television audiences would have had quite vivid and highly developed ideas of what that meant. Generally speaking, these years were also those of the last golden age of Havana decadence, pleasure, and corruption , at the end of a long reign of American corporate bankrolls, political stooge ambassadors, client political strongmen, and celebrity gangster ownership of a vast empire of earthly pleasures. Glamorous hotels flourished , the Nacional, the Sevilla-Biltmore, the Capri—and later, toward the end, the Havana Hilton and the Riviera—along with their thriving casinos and dazzling floor shows, most of them run by the US Mob in lucrative partnership with the Batista government. Exotic bars, restaurants, and night clubs, racetracks, and gambling emporiums were joined by elegant houses of prostitution and theaters featuring famous sex shows. Havana Nocturne, the popular historian T. J. English has called it in a recent book: “Neon, glitter, the mambo, and sex.” Music was everywhere; Latin orchestras were the rage, with famous bandleaders including Xavier Cugat and Pérez Prado. Booze was cheap and endless, frequently in glorious tropical concoctions. “Mi mojito en La Bodequita, Mi Daiquiri en el Floridita,” Ernest Hemingway is said to have written on the wall...

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