Cubanocast

Cuba and the United States have always had a testy relationship. Next to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the low point in Cuban-American relations was the Great Music Rebellion of 1945.

It started with a Cuban intrusion into America's musical scene. As Americans fell in love with Cuban music, some Americans suspected Cuba of starting a fifth [Conga] column with the purpose of weakening America's muscular and osteal health, thereby setting the stage for an invasion.*

Anti-Cuban music reaction was strong with semi-secret groups formed to resist Cuban (and soon all South American) music, the most prominent of these being the No Sabemos Nadas (Know-nothings).

The movement found popular expression in the thinly-veiled hate speech turned popular tune, South America: Take it Away by xenophobe sympathizers Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters.**

The song is promoting of American superiority ("We have Atomic bombs, and you?"), condescending ("Beautiful lands"), racial differentiating- with the suggestion of a unique South American physiology, and yearns for a mythical past.

Bing Crosby & the Andrews Sisters: Their Complete Recordings Together

Desi Arnaz, as proven in the I Love Lucy episode where he breaks his friendship with Fred, was never one to take an insult sitting down and replied with this blast musical fury, turning the tables on Crosby and the Andrews Sisters by mocking the Jive/Swing movement in the defiant, I'll Take the Rhumba.

Babalu by Coyne S. Sanders, Tom Gilbert

Follow up:

*...which indeed manifested itself in the fifties via television and in South Florida a decade later via whatever flew or floated (Los Angeles received a Cuban exploratory expedition headed by intrepid explorer Roberto Guirado in 1965.).

**Of course, Bing Crosby was one of the kindest, least xenophobic entertainers in the world and I'm sure the Andrews Sisters were lovely gals.