Chapter 1
Becoming Republican
Desi Arnazâs uninspiringly titled autobiography, A Book, is the story of his childhood in Cuba; his move to the United States; and his career as a musician, actor, and entertainer. His father had been the former mayor of Santiago de Cuba, a city in the Oriente province where Fidel Castro began his long march to Havana in the 1950s, by which point Arnaz was married to Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy was a smash hit. Desiâs mother had been the daughter of a BacardĂ rum executive. Desi remembered of his time in Cuba that his father and mother surrounded him with luxury. They owned three ranches, an island in Santiago Bay, and âseveralâ race cars and speedboats.
They lost it all in 1933, he wrote, when a rebellion led by students, labor activists, and military officers ousted Cuban president Gerardo Machado. Desiâs father backed Machado, who was often referred to as a dictator because of his reliance on police violence and the suppression of free speech to enforce his authority. The year before the coup, Desiâs father was elected to the Cuban House of Representatives as a Machado supporter, so when the president was removed, Desiâs father was imprisoned and the familyâs property was confiscated.
Desi and his mother fled to Miami to live in exile, and his father joined them when he was released from prison a few years later, when Desi was still a boy. According to Desi, the family started from scratch in the United States. In A Book, he claimed that the imprisonment of his father and the theft of their property sparked his lifelong hatred of socialism and communism.
The day after Machado was overthrown, another Cuban boy in Santiago, Fidel Castro, turned seven years old. He was born in 1926 in BirĂĄn, where his father owned a twenty-three-thousand-acre plantation, but at the time of the coup he was a student in Desiâs hometown. They werenât classmates because Arnaz was ten years Castroâs senior, yet they walked the same streets in Santiago de Cuba some twenty-five years before the Cuban Revolution of 1959. That revolution sent a much larger wave of Cuban exiles to Miami, who today are often thought of as the original Hispanic Republicans. Desi identified with their hatred of Castro.
One prominent exile said of Arnaz, âAnything against Fidel Castro, he supported.â More than anything else, his opposition to Castro led him to become a Republican. He gave money to the survivors of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which took place in 1961. He was the cochair of Richard Nixonâs âViva Nixonâ campaign in 1968, and in 1970 Nixon appointed him to his Advisory Council for Minority Enterprises, which didnât do much but nevertheless gestured toward Nixonâs efforts to include Hispanics and other minorities in his administration. Later, Desi gave âseed moneyâ to several exile organizations, including one started by Jorge Mas Canosa, the founder of the Cuban American National Foundation and leader of the Cuban exile community in the late twentieth century.
It is a coincidence of history that Desiâs father and mother, Gerardo Machado, and Jorge Mas Canosa are all buried in Caballero Rivero Woodlawn Cemetery, near the heart of Miamiâs Little Havana neighborhood. The body of Nicaraguan president Anastasio Somoza Debayle, another prominent leader of the Latin American right whose family ruled over the country for much of the twentieth century, is interred there as well, just steps from the gravesites of these others. Desi and Fidel were laid to rest elsewhere. Arnazâs family scattered his ashes in California, while Castro was cremated and returned to Santiago de Cuba. The ghosts of the Latin American right and left haunt the Americas, from the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The story of Desi Arnaz paints in broad brushstrokes the history of Hispanic Republicans across the twentieth century. It shows how Hispanics developed partisan identities over time, sometimes as part of the process of immigrating to and settling in the United States, and often in response to the politics of their home countries. Latin American immigrants who became Hispanic Republicans forged political identities in the crucible of conflicts between right and left, authoritarianism and democracy, and conservatism and liberalism in Latin America and the United States.
Many of these conflicts predated the Cuban Revolution, but when Hispanic Republican Cold Warriors looked back on earlier struggles between right and left in the Americasâfrom their perspective in the mid- to late twentieth century, at the height of the global Cold Warâtheir memories were refracted through the lens of these later conflicts and often seemed indistinguishable from them. Above all, Desi Arnazâs story shows how conflicts between right and left in the Americas, which by the mid-twentieth century had become part of the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, are central to the story of how Hispanics became Republicans.
HISPANICS FIRST RALLIED AROUND A REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE IN 1952, when they supported Dwight D. Eisenhower. They pinned buttons on their shirts that said âMe Gusta Ikeâ and âViva Eisenhower.â They formed groups called âLatinos con Eisenhowerâ and âLatin American Veterans and Volunteers for Eisenhower-Nixon.â Hispanic veterans were drawn to Eisenhower, in particular, because they recognized him as their commander during World War II, and believed that he would end the war in Korea. But other Hispanics who didnât serve in these wars were drawn to Eisenhower as well. Lionel Sosa, a Mexican American from San Antonio who later worked on the campaigns of several prominent Republicans, was born in 1939 and therefore was too young to serve in either war. But in his 1998 memoir The Americano Dream: How Latinos Can Achieve Success in Business and in Life, he said he first identified as a Republican when he heard Eisenhowerâs acceptance speech at the Republican national convention in Chicago, in July 1952.
Sosaâs parents were Democrats, like most other Hispanics at the time, but, he emphasized, they taught him the value of hard work. Sosaâs mother shelled pecans in San Antonio, where twelve thousand shellers walked off their jobs in 1938 to protest poor pay and working conditions. She was one of the strikers. His father ran a laundry and dry-cleaning business, âworking from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. six days a week.â His mother told him when he was six years old that even though he was âa Mexican,â he was âgoing to succeed.â
Eisenhowerâs acceptance speech echoed everything Sosaâs parents had taught him. He said hard work was a core Republican value, along with freedom, prosperity, and spirituality. That was all the motivation Sosa needed to become a Republican. He first voted in the 1960 presidential election, when he cast a ballot for Richard Nixon instead of John F. Kennedy. Then Sosa voted for Arizona senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, Nixon again in 1968 and 1972, and every other Republican presidential candidate until 2016, when he left the GOP because he couldnât bring himself to vote for Donald Trump.
The young boy from San Antonio may not have been able to vote in 1952, but other Hispanics could. John Flores, a Mexican American from California, formed âLatinos con Eisenhowerâ in April 1952 and ran it out of a room in the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. His business card claimed he ran a public relations firm with offices in Mexico City; Washington, DC; and Phoenix, Arizona. While he said Latinos con Eisenhower would seek to organize Hispanic voters in Florida, Illinois, and New York, its limited activities were concentrated in the Southwest, and even there didnât find much purchase. Still, Flores appears to have been the first Hispanic to articulate a national vision for Hispanic Republican mobilization. As a Republican himself, he observed how the Democrat Harry Truman defeated his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey, narrowly, so he believed that Hispanics, according to one historian, âcould impact a close election by increasing voter turnout and by getting normally Democratic voters to back the Republican nominee.â
When Flores established Latinos con Eisenhower, Eisenhower hadnât declared himself a candidate yet and wasnât even in the United States. He had been called back into service the year before, in April 1951, so he left his post as the president of Columbia University and returned to Europe as the supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a new military alliance among nations in Western Europe and North America designed to combat the spread of Soviet influence around the world. Flores reminded Eisenhower that he formed Latinos con Eisenhower before he even quit NATO, to let him know that his group had been with him from the beginning. Eisenhower returned to the United States in June 1952 and jumped right into his campaign for president.
Before the 1950s, Hispanic partisan identity swung like a pendulum. From the Civil War until the Great Depression, most Hispanics, like most African Americans, were Republicans, including eleven of the fifteen Hispanics who served in the US Congress. The pendulum swung in the other direction in the 1930sâagain, as it also did for African Americansâwhen more Hispanics began to support Democrats because of Franklin Rooseveltâs New Deal. Herbert Hoover and the Republican Party came to represent rich Americans in the minds of many Hispanics. Republicans were responsible for the crash that affected their families. Many Hispanics therefore credited Rooseveltâs New Deal with pulling them from dire straits. They found employment in federal job programs, which âdeepened their attachment to the Democratic Party.â
Hispanic partisan realignment was therefore part of a broader national political realignment, but, except on particular issues in particular places, it would be an overstatement to say that Hispanics were a powerful force driving political change in the early twentieth century. Estimates of the size of the Hispanic population across time are unreliable, primarily because the Census Bureau was constantly experimenting with and changing the methods and terminology they used. But without a doubt, Hispanics represented a small percentage of the US population as a whole. Mexican Americans played an important political role in southwestern territories, home to the largest Hispanic communities in the United States. In Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona, government officials conducted their business in both Spanish and English. But that changed when territories became states, and the non-Hispanic white population eclipsed the Hispanic population. Hispanics lived in Florida and New York as well, but they had a greater impact on politics in Cuba and Puerto Rico than in the Southeast or Northeast.
The erosion of Hispanic political influence led to their skepticism toward US politics. For decades after the US-Mexico War, which annexed half of Mexico to the United States, Mexican Americans remained powerful leaders in states and territories throughout the Southwest. Immediately after the Spanish American War, when many Cubans and Puerto Ricans believed that the United States had helped liberate them from Spain, citizens of Cuba and Puerto Rico expected the United States to treat them as equals. But by the early twentieth century, Mexican Americans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans were subordinates. Many remained prominent doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, but they were treated overwhelmingly as members of an inferior race.
Their skepticism had the effect of turning some Hispanics away from political involvement altogether. Many came to believe that political participation in the United States wasnât for them. A Republican governor running for reelection in the early 1960s asked his Mexican American friend to stump for him. His Hispanic surrogate agreed to deliver a speech in Spanish, in which he told his queridos conciudadanosâbeloved fellow citizensâthat he remembered a time in the mining town where he grew up when the âmembers of our race never aspired to take part in politics.â Politics, they believed, âwas for the Americans,â not them.
Moreover, until the 1950s, Hispanics mainly engaged in politics as members of groups. Mutual aid societies such as the Alianza Hispano Americana, founded in Tucson, Arizona, in 1894, or the League of United Latin American Citizens, formed in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1929, were established to help Hispanics fight for inclusion and against discrimination. These organizations or the labor unions to which Hispanic employees belonged represented Hispanics politically. If a non-Hispanic politician needed Hispanic support, he approached the organizations that he assumed could influence the votes of their members. Sometimes the politician also approached the employers of Hispanics, who bought their votes, pressured them to vote for a particular candidate, or threatened them with consequences ranging from losing their jobs to violence if they didnât comply.
What changed by the 1950s? Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics had served in World War II. They fought for freedom and democracy at home, so when they returned from the war they expected it at home. The skills they acquired in the military qualified them for better jobs than they had before they joined, and their GI Bill benefits paid for their education and helped them buy homes outside the often-segregated barrios where they had grown up. As the Hispanic surrogate for a Republican governor put it, Hispanics realized that they were âas American as any Anglo-Saxon.â Groups such as the Alianza Hispano Americana and the League of United Latin American Citizens grew dramatically in the mid-twentieth century, and were joined by others, including the American GI Forum, the Community Service Organization, and the Mexican American Political Association. These groups and othersâincluding labor unions or student organizationsâstill represented Hispanics and influenced Hispanic politics, but Hispanics also demanded rights and engaged in politics as individuals.
Postwar era demands for equality led to the political rise of some notable Hispanic Democratsâincluding Edward Roybal, a congressman from Los Angeles, Hector GarciĂĄ, the founder of the American GI Forum, and Vicente Ximenes, a founder of the Viva Kennedy clubs who worked for President Lyndon Johnsonâwhich may help explain why historians have assumed that the war made Hispanics Democrats. But this didnât map out consistently across the Hispanic population.
Many Hispanic Republicans also described World War II as a pivotal moment in the evolution of their political views. One group of Mexican American businessmen, politicians, and lawyers at a conference in Washington, DC, in the late 1960s, âbondedâ over their wartime experiences and decided to form the Republican National Hispanic Councilâlater renamed the Republican National Hispanic Assembly. They argued that the war was responsible for their upward mobility. It gave them skills that led to successful careers, paid for their education, and helped them purchase homes, often outside of the barrios where they grew up. Fernando Oaxaca, one of the men present at the meeting in Washington, who became known in GOP circles as âMr. Republican,â is a prime example. For him, the war was a âsignificant turning pointâ in his life.
Born in El Paso, Texas, in 1927, Oaxaca enlisted in the military toward the end of the war, and after his service, graduated from college with a degree in engineering that was paid for by GI Bill benefits. He started his own company and began to live a life of âaffluenceâ that made him âpolitically conservative.â He resented that the taxes he paid were redistributed to people who he claimed hadnât worked as hard as he had. To his way of thinking, the GI Bill may have opened the door to opportunity, but his individual talents and hard work made the real difference.
In the 1950s, the balance of power in the United States was also shifting from the Northeast to the Southeast and the West. Before mid-century, New York had the greatest number of electoral votes because it had the largest population. But during and after World War II, the population of the West exploded because of Sunbelt economic growth fueled primarily by the growth of the military-industrial complex. Soon states such as California, Texas, and Florida would have more electoral votes than, or almost as many electoral votes as, New York. These states with growing electoral influence also had some of the largest Hispanic populations. As the states with large Hispanic populations became more important nationally, Hispanics became voters to be recruited; the leaders of both parties increasingly believed that they had to compete for Hispanic votes to win elections.
Hispanic Republicans embraced their new role in partisan politics. They argued that the Democratic Party had begun to take them for granted, and therefore ignored them. Hispanics who were early converts to the Republican Party argued that Democrats paid attention to them only during the election season, but then ...
