Gusano - The Word of Legacy and Loss
A 64-year echo of Socialist rhetoric
While writing its official article on Wikipedia, I began doing a deep dive into the history of the usage of the Spanish word gusano. The word literally translates to “worm”, but is often used as an insult, and specifically, an insult towards the upper class of Cuba. The word “gusano” is perhaps the most ubiquitous literary residue of the Cuban Revolution that is still persistent both in and out of the country.
The usage of gusano originates in a speech that Cuban Leader Fidel Castro gave in 1961, where he informed his Cuban supporters of "shaking the rotten tree, and the gusanos will drop out."1 While assumably Castro meant the insult as a generic jab at his dissidents, the term became a staple of Cuban revolutionary rhetoric for decades to come.
While I am not going to carbon-copy my 20-paragraph Wikipedia article, I think it is important to note some important aspects of the word in contemporary Cuban life. The term was initially meant to refer to both the bourgeoisie and the Cuban exiles, but later became a term that was meant to attack anyone against the revolution. The propaganda involving gusanos (beyond the gusano column in the local newspaper) became more and more malevolent, eventually evolving into chants such as “Con saya o pantalon, gusanos al paredon.” (If wearing skirts or if wearing pants, gusanos will [turn and face] the wall [to be executed]).2
Gusano was a word that reached the streets. Hate crimes began using the word in notes of attack. A notable instance occured in Havana in Fall of 1961 when 12 corpses were found in the streets with notes attached that said “gusanos with pro-revolutionary [ideologies], CIA agents, who tried to escape to the United States.”3 Anti-revolutionaries in Cuba during the 1960s attempted to reclaim the term by buying and selling merchandise with play-on words to the label at local vendors.4
As Cubans left the country by the hundreds of thousands after their family and life’s work had been confiscated in collectivization, the Cuban diaspora took off in its largest bout in history. 60,600 Cubans had come to the United States prior to the revolution. The 1960s wave of emigration from Cuba was approximately 10 times larger than that. These Cubans were the victims of a ‘far-away attack’ with the word. The Cuban state-run newspaper would often have political cartoons accompanied by lists that would encompass all the events one would need to “Keep up with the Gusanos”.
In The United States, the term was used somewhat throughout the 1960s to the 1980s. Its usage was mostly concentrated in Florida and Louisiana, the two recipients of the most Cuban refugees during and following the revolution. However, I would argue that its usage was exacerbated by the rise in Democratic socialism in the United States.
Look no further than the land of Twitter.com for a profusion of the term in political discourse. A few select examples of the word:
The term is largely used by white or American-born progressives who do not understand the history of Cuba nor its contemporary situation. The cult of personality around Fidel Castro and the romantization of the justice of the oppressed in corrupt Cuba have brainwashed a generation of people into thinking that Cuba has some moral superiority because the literacy rate and reduction of poverty (which could have come without Socialism) trump the human rights abuses that have plagued the country since the 1960s.
In the first half of 2022, 1% of the Cuban population fled to America.5 I highly doubt any of the people who sailed from Matanzas to Miami give a flying foot about literacy rates in Cuba. The CIMAvax lung cancer vaccine, which I often see as the sole example cited by Castroists of how good the Cuban medical system is, does not detract from the fact that Cuba experiences constant medicine shortages, that despite popular belief, are not caused by an American blockade or a restriction on recieving foreign aid of food and medicine from other countries.
The usage of the word gusano is more an uneducated insult than a contemporary Cuban word at the moment. The word has become so detached from the original struggle against a truly oppressive and corrupt regime that the word is almost at a level of jamais vu in modern society as a Thesuses Ship of Hispanic Heritage.
Considering the large amount of Cubans who have fled the country in the past 65 years, as well as the large number of Cubans in the country that have little to no faith in the electoral system, it would not surprised me if a hypermajority of the usage comes from outside of the homeland of the word.
Gusano is no longer a word of resistance. It is no longer a symbol of oppression or political tension. It is no longer a badge of honor towards those targeted in hate crimes for their social status. It is nothing more than a piece of political rhetoric, buried in the trenches along with insults such as fascist, nazi, and white surpremacist, which bear little to no resemblance to the history they originate in, or to the evil that it once rebelled against.