From Marianao to Mayberry

The first episode of The Andy Griffith Show aired fifty-four years ago this Friday. We asked noted writer and scholar Gustavo Pérez Firmat (one of Newsweek's “100 Americans to watch for in the 21st century”) to reflect on what the show meant to him as a Cuban exile and immigrant to the United States. His new book, A Cuban in Mayberry: Looking Back at America's Hometown, wrestles with the "irreplaceable intimacy between person and place" and explores how his addiction to reruns of The Andy Griffith Show provided an illusion of belonging to a community in which he never would have felt accepted.

We hope you enjoy this fascinating and touching tribute to a classic American cultural product from a very unique perspective.


From Marianao to Mayberry

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By Gustavo Pérez Firmat

The Andy Griffith Show (TAGS to aficionados) premiered on CBS on Monday October 3, 1960. Exactly three weeks later, on Monday October 24, I left Cuba with my parents, my two brothers and my sister on an overnight ferry to Key West called, of all things, The City of Havana. I was eleven years old. My parents were in their late thirties. That evening, as the City of Havana was crossing the Florida straits, CBS broadcast the fourth episode of TAGS, which has to do with the arrival in Mayberry of Ellie Walker, the first of Andy’s several girlfriends. As Ellie was beginning a new life in Mayberry, the Pérez family was beginning a new life in America. Ours would take me from Marianao, the Havana neighborhood where I was born, to Miami, where I grew up, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I’ve lived most of my adult life, and from there to Mayberry, the fictional town where The Andy Griffith Show takes place.

A Cuban in Mayberry tells the story of how I became an undocumented Mayberrian, the town’s resident alien, the lone Cuban coot in a flock of Southern geezers. If our work should be the praise of what we love, as John Ruskin believed, this is the story of my late-blooming love affair with an imaginary town and its citizens—call it a Mayberry-December romance.