Los Gusanos by John Sayles

First published: 1991

Type of plot: Political realism

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Miami, Florida

Principal Characters:

• Scipio de la Pena, an aging and ailing Cuban exile who fought at the Bay of Pigs
• Marta de la Pena, Scipio’s daughter
• Blas de la Pena, Scipio’s eldest son
• Ambrosio de la Pena, Scipio’s youngest son, killed at the Bay of Pigs
• Felix de la Pena, Scipio’s brother
• Guillermo Nuñez (El Halcón), a professional killer
• Luz, a Cuban exile who works in a nursing home
• Serafín, Luz’s brother
• Rufo, Luz’s boyfriend, a small-time criminal
• Narciso Villas, a Cuban exile and former professor
• Walt, a CIA agent
• Dewey, an orderly at the nursing home
• Roosevelt, an orderly at the nursing home
• Duckworth, a Miami police detective
• Rivkin, a Miami police detective
• Padre Martín, a defrocked Catholic priest and Cuban exile

The Novel

Los Gusanos takes place primarily in the 1980’s, though the narrative frequently flashes back to the 1960’s and to events surrounding the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The novel centers on a family of Cuban exiles and on the attempts of one member of that family to organize another invasion of Cuba to strike at least a symbolic blow at the object of their personal and political hatred, Fidel Castro. The novel is narrated in the third person, but it includes sections of one character’s journal and the recorded imaginings of another. The narration shifts its focus through a number of characters, taking the reader into their various consciousnesses. The story begins in 1981 in Miami, Florida, in the heart of the Cuban exile community of Little Havana. Scipio de la Pena, a leader of the ill-fated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, lies dying in a nursing home bed. He is rarely coherent, but he is faithfully attended by his daughter, Marta de la Pena, who talks to him of the invasion. Marta is the one child of Scipio who did not take part in the attack on Castro’s Cuba. Her oldest brother, Blas, survived the attack but has lived outside the United States, a criminal exile, for several years. Marta’s younger brother, Ambrosio, a poet, was killed in the invasion but left behind a diary that forms part of the novel’s narrative and becomes a part of the invasion’s history. The novel’s central plot details Marta’s attempt to mount a second (and more or less symbolic) invasion of Cuba.

One of the novel’s secondary plots involves another young woman and Cuban exile, Luz, who attends to Scipio in the nursing home. Luz moves through a number of relationships with local men, and in the course of doing so finds herself involved with Rufo, who looks to involve himself in the political and criminal activity of Little Havana. Luz’s brother, Serafín, meanwhile finds himself romantically attracted to Marta, who has little time for anything that is not political.

Around these two plots swirl a number of lesser but related plot lines. A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent works to manipulate Marta and her recruits to the best advantage of the agency and of U.S. interests in the region. Two local police detectives investigate a murder that seems to be connected to the local exile community and to the gangs that have sprouted from that community. A man known as El Halcón haunts the edges of this community; he is a killer, willing to work for whoever best pays him for his services—CIA, Castro loyalists, or exiles.

As the story moves through these various narrative angles, characters move in and out of one anothers’ lives, sometimes touching only obliquely, sometimes growing to be profound parts of those lives. Marta de la Pena stands outside most of these relationships as she concentrates on pulling together the threads of her invasion plan and on recruiting members to her cause. Various forces—internal and external—exert themselves on Marta, who finds herself learning more and more about the political machinery that once ran the anti-Castro movement in Cuba and which now operates out of the realm of exile. She also learns—and the reader learns—of the histories of betrayal and falsehood that inform this movement.

Eventually, Marta realizes her dream, taking her small band out of Miami and to the shores of Cuba. There, they make what is effectively a symbolic (and in some ways a tragically ironic) strike against Castro and against the history that claimed her brother’s life twenty years earlier.

The Characters

In Los Gusanos, John Sayles assembles an expansive cast of characters, all of whom bear some relation—whether acknowledged or not—to the political events that marked the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Moreover, most of these characters lead lives still defined by that invasion; even in exile from their homeland, these Cubanos participate in the past and the present of the world from which they were severed. Marta de la Pena has inherited the revolutionary fervor from her father, Scipio, who is now bedridden by a stroke. Exempted from the original invasion because of her age, and never taken quite seriously because of her sex, Marta looks to redeem her father’s “heroic failure” by organizing a second attempt at the island. She is, in effect, a Cuban Joan-of-Arc-in-exile who looks to become her father’s third “son.” At heart, Marta probably aspires to martyrdom, but her immediate aim is to strike a blow against the Castro regime that took her father’s heart and her younger brother’s life and that turned her older brother from a political exile into a criminal thug. Marta collects the history of her island and of the revolution, taking to heart the idealism that spurred her family—and other like-minded Cubans—to political action.

Marta’s youngest brother, Ambrosio, comes closest to capturing the pure spirit of the rebellion. He is a poet and a historian; he records the experience of his training, of his indoctrination, of his brief fight for the Fulgencio Batista movement in his diary. This diary serves as one of the alternative narratives in Los Gusanos; it becomes the voice of Ambrosio, speaking to Marta and to the reader from the time of the invasion. Interleaved among Ambrosio’s prose recollections are his poems, which present both a portrait of los gusanos—“the worms,” as Castro himself called those Cubans who sided with Batista and against him—and a self-portrait of the poet-warrior. Ambrosio finally becomes a victim of the dark web of betrayal that confounds the Brigade; on the verge of actually facing battle in the invasion, Ambrosio is murdered—for vague and shadowy political reasons—by the vicious and amoral El Halcón.

It is partly to avenge that murder that Blas de la Pena returns to Miami. Risking discovery and arrest for his own various crimes, Blas lands in Miami to search out the killer of his brother and to exact a certain degree of revenge for both the death of Ambrosio and the failure of the revolution. All the idealism of his father and his brother has been drained from Blas by the long, disillusioning string of betrayals; played false by the CIA and the U.S. government, Blas places his political and personal faith in himself only. As ugly as his nature is, he does manage to bring El Halcón to a deadly accounting for his sins against the family and the movement. Blas de la Pena stands diametrically opposed to his brother in his nature and his sensibilities. He is, at the beginning of the struggle, the true fighter for the true cause. By its end, however, he has become a bitter, sometimes brutal realist who reads his country’s history with a jaundiced eye.

All this history catalyzes Marta de la Pena toward renewal of the fight. She moves about Little Havana trying to collect recruits and arms for her mission, her quest. She enlists her Uncle Felix, who himself fought against Castro at the Bay of Pigs and whose boat carries Marta and her band toward Cuba once again. Persuaded to join Marta as well is Padre Martín, a defrocked Catholic priest who feels the dual loyalties of church and homeland tugging at him. She also attracts Dewey, the young orderly at her father’s nursing home. Distracted by masculinist, militarist fantasies, Dewey constructs an elaborate dream life as a sort of mercenary without a cause; his own “journal” functions as a second alternative narrative in Los Gusanos, and it records his gradual psychological disintegration. Before he can actually live out his fantasy as a member of Marta’s rebel band, Dewey breaks down and shoots up his apartment, an act that gets him arrested and removed from the action.

Critical Context

John Sayles is a writer who perhaps is better known popularly as a filmmaker. However, his fiction has been consistently acclaimed by scholars of contemporary writing for its realistic imaginings of the political and social lives of its characters. In Los Gusanos, Sayles extends his vision to include the broadly historical stories of the Cuban American community, stories inherently wrought by various geopolitical dimensions. The novel is critically interesting, as well, for its narrative adventuresomeness. Sayles filters his novel’s action through the imaginations of several different characters, and he offers alternative narratives (diaries, imagined journals) that complement or compete with the dominant narrative in the novel. Sayles also attends to the fidelity of language, strategically sprinkling passages of Spanish throughout Los Gusanos, challenging the reader to enter the very cultural milieu of his characters and to make sense of what initially might be foreign and obscure.

Finally, Sayles takes on the serious and much-argued question of history—its textuality, its reliability, its very nature as truthful narrative. In some ways, Los Gusanos might be considered a historical novel, taking as it does the complex story of Fidel Castro, Fulgencio Batista, the Brigade, and the Bay of Pigs invasion as its narrative backdrop. Sayles also takes into account the multitude of personalities who contribute to the shaping and the telling of history, who contribute their fictions, their biographies, their lies to the larger story that is labeled as history. It is perhaps on this level—as historical critique and as a critique of historical writing—that Los Gusanos operates most significantly.

Bibliography

Davis, Thulani. “Blue-Collar Auteur.” American Film 16, no. 6 (June, 1991): 18-25. A discussion of Sayles’s oeuvre in the context of his film work. Includes an excerpt from Los Gusanos.

Goodwin, Jo-Ann. Review of Los Gusanos, by John Sayles. New Statesman and Society 4, no. 171 (October 4, 1991): 36-37. An interesting British perspective on the novel.

Kenan, Randall. Review of Los Gusanos, by John Sayles. Nation 252, no. 24 (June 24, 1991): 856-858. A provocative discussion of the novel.

Sayles, John, and Gavin Smith. Sayles on Sayles. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Contains a series of interviews with Sayles, each of which takes up a separate work of fiction or film. An indispensable source.

Simpson, Janice C. “Neck Deep in the Culture.” Time 138, no. 5 (August 5, 1991): 64. A discussion of Sayles’s work in literature, films, and television. Focuses on his penchant for championing underdogs and outsiders.