Eating Cuban on Miami’s Calle Ocho

Hi Jim:

I agree that the best place to put your standout line is not the beginning but the end. When you say, “the rapid-fire Cuban-Spanish sentences whizzing past me like 90-mile-per-hour fastballs on a Havana baseball daimond,” what you actually mean is you don’t know a word of Spanish. Neither do I.

Which is surprising, because the U.S. really is bilingual. You know, NAFTA and stuff. As I writeout my grocery wish list for items to check in my Amazon cart today—it being Valentine’s day—I’m thinking a nice book about Hemingway and his uneasy relationship to Cuba would hit the spot, along with a celebratory cubano, and a stiff cuba libre.

Despite the presence of foul-smelling communism on the impressively bearded, but historically obsolete, dictator Castro’s private country club, the recent emigrés I’ve met say, in so many words, “We’re just like you; we know how to party!” My “foreign” friends from Europe do indeed report back that the beaches are blindingly white and worthy of accepting universal healthcare in return for backbreaking labor and a piddling trifle of a paycheck. Hey, free boots!

No offense, but a Caribbean island like that, just like in the old days, would be an automatic draw. Fred and Ethel are indeed coming to tea, Lucy. If Cuba’s system wasn’t based upon a sadsack holed up in a London flophouse, penning elegantly written manifestos, oozing sour grapes and social inferiority complexes, wondering how much brandy he could drink if everyone united and worked for him for exactly five years—then, and only then, we could actually imagine some utopia based on the vision of Sir Thomas More. But remember, he was literally beheaded for poaching.

Anyway, in every restaurant here in New York Spanish is widely spoken, a lot of it behind our backs. Every time a Spanish waiter approaches me with a ten-foot-long shaker resembling a rifle barrel, asking, “Fresh Bepper?” I thank my stars and stripes that I was born in the free trade humor zone called the good old U.S. of A. I laugh so hard I can hardly stand up sometimes.

Viva la pura vida!

The funny thing is, I speak quite a bit of Spanish. But it’s a slower Mexican or Central American Spanish. Cuban Spanish is something else entirely. Lots of dropped consonants and super fast. It’s practically a different language.

Hi Jim:

Gotja!

You speak fluid Spanish. Now I feel bad. You probably even know Catalan and say “cervetha.”

I feel like a complete dullard sometimes when I’m around my Spanish friends and instant acquaintances. Though they speak to me in elegant, probably memorized, one-line rejoinders in the language we—come on, buddy, stick with me on this one—call home, I can’t help thinking that behind my back, with evident delight, they are calling me names like “left fender” and “driveby weightlessness.” Or “The Grand Castillo de Jagua.”

Ditto, “chicana.” No idea what that means. Hot bod babe with blonde hair and ample cleavage from a Spanish soap opera? Maybe, it’s like the French term BCBG (bon chic, bon gout), describing how residents of “Passy” in Paris have the monkey’s share of the pot. “Martha, you haven’t yet told me how much you like my jacket. . . .”

When I insist that the term “Hispanic” makes it sound like everyone is from the island of Hispaniola—and might be explicitly described by a suburban cop in a police blotter as being rather fond of light criminality and petty thievery—rather than pretty much all of Central and South America, the much saner blanket statement of “Latin American” not only drives home the fact that Spanish derives from the lingua franca of the Romans, whom we all know built our roads, but might in fact be easier to learn than English.

Que?

Yes, I sneer like a cruel Christian conqueror from Caceras at the abject humility of being born a human with innate language skills, wondering, like we all, why we were born here in the first place.

Me? I love just about everything about Miami. :Love that sign BTW.

Very interesting to know the authentic Cuban culture. Thanks Jim.

It is interesting to read how other Latino cultures (other than Mexican), behave in the us.  Thanks.