As I write this, I’m currently reading Tom Miller’s excellent book, Trading with the Enemy. A Yankee Travels Through Castro’s Cuba. Unlike so many other books about the fascinating island, it does not mouth the party line, doled out by publicists and government spokespeople (both American and Cuban.) Instead, Miller traversed the island, meeting the people, living and speaking with them personally and reporting what he learned. Among the many details that resonate so strongly with me, his take on Cuban Spanish, which, he says, “has no vowels and no consonants.” You laugh. My first experience with Cuban Spanish was with the prostitute-neighbor in Almodóvar’s Volver. The letter S vanishes. Vamos becomes vamo, and so on. Add to that a rapid-fire method of speaking and ¡Ay, caramba! On several occasions I asked my new Cuban friends there to “speak to me as if I were a baby.” It worked. Sometimes. (Printed Spanish in Cuba, as in the understandable warning above, follows normal rules. Mercifully.)
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