I’ll probably get dunked on for saying this but I feel like “gusano” is kind of a racist term. It’s an insult only used against people of a specific descent and I usually see white people use it against people of color of Cuban descent, but never against white people with the exact same viewpoints who are white. It strikes me as racist but accepted because it’s used against shitty people with shitty views.
I mean most of the Cubans getting called that are white themselves, including Destiny. Are you referring to brown American Cubans getting called that as well? Gusano has been stretched since its original usage to describe any foreign national that immigrates to the US and spews right-wing garbage against their countries. I’ve seen it used to describe Chinese liberals and Russian liberals.
It would be pointless to use against a fourth generation German-American who is too far removed from Germany to be a gusano. But it could absolutely be used for a German man living in the US and talking about how it’s good the US de-industrialized his country.
Gusano, escuálido, pitiyanqui, bobaliberal, bolsominion, kulak, pitita, and other local words like it, come from a revolutionary context. They’re not racialized terms. They’re specifically used to denote counterrevolutionary or reactionary elements in our societies. But these terms can also denote traitors in general, as in class or race traitors, people who betray the interests of their own people in favor of the US, who prostrate themselves like Milei did with Trump recently. It is this servility, this submission, this spinelessness towards US interests and views, that we shit on when we say gusano.
It’s weird that if you’re from a Spanish speaking country in the Americas, you’re immediately not white in the USA.
There are white people from Cuba, it was the owning class who left. Which is why beaches were segregated before Fidel.
Fidel used Gusano in a specific context, it’s not a viewpoint thing, more of a discrediting of the “my family was targetted by communists in a civil war” (for owning 100 acres and a plantation)
The only equivalent for Euros I can think of is when people of German heritage can’t account for their family history between the late 1930s to 1945. The Bolsheviks took power too long ago for it to be used for eastern europeans, grandparents who fleed did it in different circumstances, and I guess Kulak is the closest equivalent there.
But Kulak ownership structure was different, it was more self employment which is why a lot of peasant political parties were liberals in the face of monarchy, instead of being revolutionaries.
Gusano meaning bourgeois landlords who left due to communist revolution hasn’t been done more recently so there’s no one else to apply the term to really. Maybe white South Africans? Except they still own a lot of that country, and the colonization worked differently.
I usually see white people use it against people of color of Cuban descent, but never against white people with the exact same viewpoints who are white.
I’ve seen Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Robert Menendez described as gusanos quite a few times.
I do see a trend in Terminally Online Media to have a Token Black Guy give the “I dream of a free and democratic Cuba!” line, and then a dozen other extremely generic accounts scream “Racism!” at anyone who shows disgust. But there is no shortage of pasty faced “Fidel took all my slaves” mfers who earn the label, regularly.
I’ll probably get dunked on for saying this but I feel like “gusano” is kind of a racist term. It’s an insult only used against people of a specific descent and I usually see white people use it against people of color of Cuban descent, but never against white people with the exact same viewpoints who are white. It strikes me as racist but accepted because it’s used against shitty people with shitty views.
I mean most of the Cubans getting called that are white themselves, including Destiny. Are you referring to brown American Cubans getting called that as well? Gusano has been stretched since its original usage to describe any foreign national that immigrates to the US and spews right-wing garbage against their countries. I’ve seen it used to describe Chinese liberals and Russian liberals.
It would be pointless to use against a fourth generation German-American who is too far removed from Germany to be a gusano. But it could absolutely be used for a German man living in the US and talking about how it’s good the US de-industrialized his country.
Gusano, escuálido, pitiyanqui, bobaliberal, bolsominion, kulak, pitita, and other local words like it, come from a revolutionary context. They’re not racialized terms. They’re specifically used to denote counterrevolutionary or reactionary elements in our societies. But these terms can also denote traitors in general, as in class or race traitors, people who betray the interests of their own people in favor of the US, who prostrate themselves like Milei did with Trump recently. It is this servility, this submission, this spinelessness towards US interests and views, that we shit on when we say gusano.
Bolsominion lmao
isn’t destiny the exact whitey with Cuban ancestors you’re claiming doesn’t get the pejorative used against them?
same energy as that taiwanese lemmitor who said ‘comprador’ is a slur
It’s weird that if you’re from a Spanish speaking country in the Americas, you’re immediately not white in the USA.
There are white people from Cuba, it was the owning class who left. Which is why beaches were segregated before Fidel.
Fidel used Gusano in a specific context, it’s not a viewpoint thing, more of a discrediting of the “my family was targetted by communists in a civil war” (for owning 100 acres and a plantation)
The only equivalent for Euros I can think of is when people of German heritage can’t account for their family history between the late 1930s to 1945. The Bolsheviks took power too long ago for it to be used for eastern europeans, grandparents who fleed did it in different circumstances, and I guess Kulak is the closest equivalent there.
But Kulak ownership structure was different, it was more self employment which is why a lot of peasant political parties were liberals in the face of monarchy, instead of being revolutionaries.
Gusano meaning bourgeois landlords who left due to communist revolution hasn’t been done more recently so there’s no one else to apply the term to really. Maybe white South Africans? Except they still own a lot of that country, and the colonization worked differently.
I’m gonna keep saying gusano and cracker
It is not racist, literally no one has ever thought that until Destiny cooked up this stupid idea.
I’ve seen Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Robert Menendez described as gusanos quite a few times.
I do see a trend in Terminally Online Media to have a Token Black Guy give the “I dream of a free and democratic Cuba!” line, and then a dozen other extremely generic accounts scream “Racism!” at anyone who shows disgust. But there is no shortage of pasty faced “Fidel took all my slaves” mfers who earn the label, regularly.
This is the correct take.
I think it’s weird this problematization of gusano (claiming it’s racist) was made in the context of using it to describe Destiny, who is white.
That is true. Destiny is very pale.