From: LIFE ON THE HYPHEN: THE CUBAN-AMERICAN WAY (1994)

It is difficult to watch many episodes of I Love Lucy without noticing that one of the not-so-hidden themes of the show is one Cuban man’s fascination with Americana, and more pointedly, with americanas -- those “glorious hunks of stuff” that Ricky tends drool over. In one sense, I Love Lucy is a theater of domestic war; in another, it is a melodrama, or better, a mellow drama that plays out the fateful rendezvous of one Cuban’s scrambled ego with his no less scrambled id. Looking at the series through Ricky’s eyes, that is, looking at it through the “I” in the title, the theme of the show is Ricky’s romance with otherness. I Love Lucy showcases the advantages of what we might term “hetero-culturalism,” the belief that opposite cultures attract. Ricky’s cultural preferences merge with his sexual preferences. Just as the opposite sex is the apposite sex, the opposite culture is the apposite culture. As we saw earlier, Lucy and Ricky’s bedroom is an important element in the spatial disposition of the program. One may even venture that the twin beds themselves are material symbols for Lucy’s and Ricky’s differences. If this is so, the defnitive metaphor for the cultural divide that separates Lucy from Ricky (and Ricky from Ricardo) is the distance between beds. But this distance was certainly not inviolable. The twin beds stand in apposition, not opposition. Let’s remember how the typical episode ends: Lucy and Ricky make up, clinch, and kiss. After the kiss the next thing we see is a heart superimposed on rumpled satin sheets, and moments later the inscription, “I Love Lucy.” Stripped to its literal core, the title of the series is quite racy, for it is in the bedroom that Ricky really loves Lucy. The title of the series defines Ricky not as husband, not as father, not as entertainer, but only as lover. Ricky’s “I” is a lover’s “I.” The episodes of the series are fragments from a lover’s discourse. Who can doubt that Lucy and Ricky spent their nights making cross-over dreams come true?

I Love Lucy is the great Cuban-American love story. Essentially a chronicle of how a Cuban man and an American woman live together, this show is as fine an example as we have of the pleasures and perils of bicultural romance. Beginning with the title, the focus is on the Ricardos’ rich, complex, and sometimes conflicted relationship -- a relationship that in ways both deliberate and inadvertent mirrorred Ball and Arnaz’s own complicated marriage. As a one-and-a-halfer, Ricky is too young to be Cuban and too old to be American. But he is exactly the right age to be Cuban American, and exactly the right age to make the best of loving Lucy. Cuban-American culture begins in bed, on those rumpled satin sheets that by now have become an enduring American icon. Lucy and Ricky enjoin what they enjoyed: life on the hyphen, the Cuban-American way. Desi Arnaz once remarked that “history is made at night.” He must have been thinking of the Ricardos. Lucy and Ricky--when they made love, they made history.

I will make no attempt to hide my bicultural bias. I love Ricky because he loves Lucy. In the Cuban-American tradition, one calls this a Desi Chain.