Man's best friend outside of a dog, 9: Los Gusanos, by John Sayles

For the second half of our Cuban-American double feature, we have Los Gusanos (The Worms), by John Sayles. I should say off the bat that Sayles is one of those guys who has slipped under my radar. Best known as a director (Lone Star, Return of the Seacacus 7, Brother from Another Planet), the only movie of his that I've actually seen is Eight Men Out, and that only because it's about baseball. I can't claim any credit for picking this book up somewhere; as I remember, we got it during a Christmas book exchange, but sometimes you really do get lucky. Like the book I read immediately prior to it, the focus is on the Cuban-American and Cuban communities, though with a primary focus on Miami. Even though the basic setups are roughly the same, spanning decades in the lives of its protagonists, the books could hardly be more different. Sayles has a definite story to tell, and even though we often get looks insides his characters heads, they are very much rooted to their own location and situation. This is not a novel of dreams, but one of concrete histories, showing how we reach our current state through a series of events and experiences. Put another way, whereas the motivating forces in Dreaming in Cuban are primarily internal, here they are almost exclusively external. Characters are much more deeply tied to each other, in the tangled web of politics and culture that is Miami.

In many ways, the governments exist in Los Gusanos immediately off-screen, acting via the CIA and other sources to keep the community constantly in flux. Then again, I think it is fair to say that the Cuban community in Miami does a pretty good job of that all on their own. One of the greatest mysteries to me has been how the US government seems willing to maintain a policy towards Cuba that has never shown any sign of working, all while the expat community supports the vociferously no matter how many times the CIA undercuts their aspirations of retaking the island. From the Bay of Pigs to later failed insurgencies, it seems that some forces in our government are willing to trade something, be it reliable Republican votes, some control over organized crime in Southern Florida, or god only knows what, just so long as they make sure to say really mean things about Fidel. As for the Cuban-American community, you might think that having failed to overthrow Fidel for 40 years now, they might be willing to consider some amount of compromise in order to see long-separated family members...but apparently you'd be wrong.

In the novel, this plays out as a generation torn between the appeal of organized crime, ragtag invasion militias, or quieter, more humdrum lives in the beautiful weather of South Florida. Living so fast, many fail to see just how much they are pawns in the hands of the powerful (or to quote Fidel himself, Gusanos). Through vignettes, we get to see fragments of the life stories of the many protagonists, reminiscent of something one might expect from Robert Altman. It's hard to identify any particular story that is truly more compelling than the rest, but it's interesting to read a big, sprawling novel that can manage to balance any number of competing threads to paint a picture of a city across the years much more successfully than groups of blind men are typically assumed to describe elephants. If the characters themselves are a bit flat, the settings themselves certainly jump out. It's not the language per se, which features a somewhat intimidating amount of Spanish intermixed with decent prose, but rather the clear idea that he has for each chapter, infusing each with a strong sense of narrative flow that carries throughout the novel. I have to say, for a random acquisition, I really liked the book, enough to add several of his films to our Netflix queue.