Honoring Desi Arnaz with a historical marker at the location of the former Park Avenue nightclub at Collins Park will be a significant, and long overdue, tribute to one of America's most famous adopted sons. The determination, talent, and perseverance this teenage refugee first demonstrated here would ultimately change the course of television entertainment.

He was born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha on March 2, 1917 in Santiago, Cuba. His father was a prominent physician, a wealthy landowner, and a popular senator. But in 1933, Batista's Cuban Revolution forced Desi and his dad to flee to Miami (his mother would arrive later) where the penniless 17-year-old arrived without an ability to speak, read, or understand English. Remarkably, despite their reversal of fortune, neither he nor his father ever gave up hope. Their mantra "There has to be a way..." assured them they could overcome any obstacle.

For Desi, that meant cleaning canary cages for 25 cents each, helping his dad lay tile in Miami Beach homes, and struggling to save money by sleeping not in a home or in a boarding house, but on cots shoved in the back of a warehouse on SW Third Avenue. Arnaz never forgot sleeping with a club to protect himself and his father from the rats that infested the building. 

A family friend and fellow refugee helped Desi enroll at St. Patrick Catholic School. Over time, he improved his English, learned guitar and the conga drum, and assimilated into his adopted home. Following graduation he played a few gigs at the Roney Plaza Hotel where bandleader Xavier Cugat spotted the teenager's potential and took him on tour.

Returning to Miami in 1937, Arnaz met Bobby Kelly, son of entrepreneurial restaurateur 'Mother' Kelly, who was then opening a 200-seat nightclub as an addition to the brand new Park Avenue restaurant. Promising Kelly an orchestra and pitching himself as Cugat's star performer, Desi was hired for a two-week engagement. Unfortunately at the club's December 30, 1937 premiere, it was obvious the 20-year-old had been so desperate for work he didn't reveal his "orchestra" was really just the Siboney Septet, a handful of musicians who couldn't play the Latin rhythms Arnaz had promised. That's when his maxim -- "There has to be a way..." -- kicked in. Remembering his childhood in Santiago where a hypnotic rhythm was played at city-wide parties that stretched from dusk to dawn, Arnaz quickly taught the musicians to play a cadence of 'One-two-three-KICK!' Arnaz beat his conga drum in time, shouted to the audience to follow him, and above this primal rhythm he proceeded to march everyone around the bar, out the doors of the Park Avenue, and down 22nd Street for several blocks before circling back into the nightclub.

What Arnaz called his 'Dance of Desperation' launched 'The Conga Craze' in America. Even more significantly, the ensuing publicity raised his profile and led to Broadway, then to Hollywood where he met the love of his life, Lucille Ball with the two becoming the proud parents of Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz, Jr., to his own (actual) orchestra, and ultimately the production and ownership of 'I Love Lucy' and, most incredibly, the couples' purchase of RKO Studios. Along the way, his development of technical innovations such as shooting programs on three cameras, on film, and before a live studio audience would transform television and American entertainment.

And it all started in Miami Beach.