A doctor by profession, my paternal granduncle, José Navarro, had once held several high-ranking positions in the Cuban army. His closest friend was Desiderio (Desi) Arnaz, Sr., father of Desiderio (Desi) Arnaz, Jr., the Ricky Ricardo of the of the classic I Love Lucy television show. José and Desi, Sr. had fled Cuba in the same private plane at the outbreak of a revolution in 1933 with nothing but the clothes on their backs, and settled in Miami. According to other exiles, José had been accused of ordering the execution of five members of the opposition, while Desi, as former mayor of Santiago, the country’s second largest city, and later a member of the Cuban Congress, simply had the misfortune of being on the wrong side of the conflict.
For a year José worked as an orderly at a hospital in Miami, until he learned English well enough to take the Florida Medical Boards, which he passed on his second try, at age 50, and started a private practice. Desi, for his part, an architect by profession, launched a successful career buying run-down houses, remodeling them, and selling them for a handsome profit.
José and Desi maintained a love-hate relationship for many years. Every Sunday the two would get together for dinner to reminiscence on their heyday in Cuba. Their reminiscences, however, would invariably turn sour, and the two old Cubans would end up shouting insults at each other, while their sweet-tempered American wives—both men having since divorced, or abandoned, their Cuban spouses—did their best to maintain a civil conversation on the side. As the quarreling over the dinner table grew heated, The Arnaz’s old Chihuahua, Dandi, a surly little thing in her own right, would scurry about under the table, growling and snapping at any hand that dared reach down to pet her. Fortunately, she had lost all her teeth. Come next Sunday, everybody would meet again for dinner and replay the same scene.
Eventually José closed his Miami office and moved with his wife into a corals-tone house near Homestead, on a 50-acre scrub pine forest they bought for practically nothing from a retired New York stock broker who, after a year of bucolic boredom, couldn’t wait to get back to the exhilarating bustle of the big city. José, on the other hand, considered himself a man of the land, a true-blood Cuban guajiro. He had 40 acres cleared for mango and avocado groves, planting and nurturing each sapling with his own hands, and reserved the other ten acres for chickens, geese, ducks, hogs, goats, and a milk cow.
José also fancied himself a humanitarian. Perhaps to atone for his violent past, he converted a cinderblock outbuilding behind the house into a clinic for tenant farmers and migrant workers. If his patients were broke, as was often the case, they could pay him with a few token hours of labor on weekends. José could have easily exploited those poor folk, held them in bondage for months, but, to his credit, he never did.
The subject that usually triggered the quarreling between José and Desi was politics. But what really set them off was the other man’s wardrobe. José’s usual attire, even when attending patients, were khaki work clothes, scuffed leather boots and, when outdoors, a broad-rimmed straw hat. By stark contrast, Desi’s apparel was that of a grandee fop: patent leather shoes, tailored gabardine trousers, silk shirts, socks and fine-linen handkerchiefs liberally dabbed with expensive French Cologne. When any of Desi’s article of clothing went out of fashion, in whatever small detail, he would give it away and buy the latest. Jose’s only suit, which he rarely wore, save to weddings and funerals, was a white double-breasted linen job, the kind one sees only in silent movies, so stiff from disuse that it could stand up by itself Their hands, too, were a study in contrast, José’s sunburned and calloused, Desi’s soft and well manicured.
One of the rooms in his house José had set aside for his collection of firearms, a veritable arsenal, ranging from a pocket-sized Civil War Derringer like the one used by John Wilkes Booth on Abraham Lincoln, to a rifle taken from the corpse of Japanese soldier in Iwo Jima who, rather than surrender, had honorably shot himself in the mouth with it by pulling the trigger with his big toe. Or so the story went from the Marine veteran who sold José the rifle.
Among the firearms in José’s collection was an antique double-barrel shotgun that had belonged to the father of his American wife, a New England sea captain who, according to family lore, had once used it to put down a mutiny aboard his ship. That same year, 1902, the captain died of a blood infection caused by a bite on from his pet parrot, the bird having mistaken the thumb for a cookie.
Firing that antique 12-guage was easier said than done. One couldn’t miss with it at 50 feet, but so powerful was its kick that it could knock a man flat on his back. For protection against intruders, though none ever showed up, José kept two loaded handguns, one by his bedside and the other in the medicine cabinet of his clinic, in case of an emergency. The double barrel shotgun, that piece he reserved for daily use.
Like many otherwise fearless men, José had a phobia. His was a dread of amphibians. Other than the occasional killing of a rattlesnake, he employed the double-barrel exclusively for blowing away the hordes of frogs and toads that during the rainy season invaded the farm. The whole yard between the house and the clinic was pockmarked with crater-sized holes where the hapless creatures had been blasted to smithereens. The early morning BLAM! BLAM! of the double-barrel had become a familiar and reassuring sound, a sign that old man was in good health and the rest of the day would get on according to schedule.
Somehow Desi got wind of José’s phobia and, naturally, couldn’t resist the temptation of using it against him the first opportunity that persented itself. At a novelty store in Miami, he bought a realistic-looking rubber frog that wiggled when compressed and, grinning impishly, waited for the right moment.
The moment came one May 20, Cuban Independence Day. José was hosting an outdoor dinner party at the farm for his Cuban acquaintances, regaling them with embellished stories about his military exploits in Cuba (the man was gifted story teller), charming the women, and, of course, casting an occasional dig at Desi’s sartorial tastes.
Pretending he had a cramp in his foot, Desi got up from the table, sneaked up behind the chair where José was sitting and, subtly, without anyone noticing it, took the rubber frog out his pocket, compressed so it would wiggle, and plopped it on the table in front of José.
“Hey,” he said smiling at the guests “Look at that little green frog. Isn’t it cute?”
At the sight of the wiggling frog, José bolted from the table, screaming, “Coño! Una ranita!,” and dashed into the house, followed by his wife, the even-tempered Americana fearful that her crazy husband might come out with the shotgun and blow away the ranita as well as any unfortunate invitado who happened to be in the way.
The invitados looked at one another in disbelief. Then one by one they starting smiling, then chuckling, then laughing, then all guffawing as one, with Desi the loudest.
The Arnaz’s Chihuahua had meanwhile came out from under the table to sniff the black beans and rice that José, in his panic, had spilled on the ground, but not liking the smell, she snarled a disapproving snarl, and went back under the table to lay at her master’s feet, sulking as usual.
By the time José returned to the party, the green ranita was back in Desi’s pocket. So José never knew it was fake, and Desi never told him. From then on, though, when José started in on Desi’s wardrobe, Desi would counter with the ranita incident and José would back off.
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