1.Cubans won’t tell you something was “confusing,” they’ll tell you it was a “huge rice with mango” (tremendo arroz con mango).
2.Cubans will never do something “underhandedly,” they will do it “by the left” (por la izquierda).
3.Cubans don’t think you are “pretentious,” they think you “polish yourself a lot” (te das tremenda lija).
4.Cubans won’t say something is a “big lie,” they’ll tell you it is a “big package” (tremendo paquete).
5.Cubans won’t ask you to “keep a secret,” they’ll say “with a closed mouth, flies don’t enter” (boca cerrada no entran moscas).
6.Cubans are not “very talented,” they “go to Havana and extinguish fires” (va a La Habana y apaga fuego).
7.Cubans don’t ask you to “stop being a fool,” they ask you to “stop consuming feces” (deja de comer mierda).
8.Cubans aren’t just “fed up,” they are “up to their last hair” (hasta el último pelo).
9.Cubans don’t say you should “attack the problem at its source,” they say “if the dog is dead, the rabies will stop” (muerto el perro se acaba la rabia).
10.Cubans don’t think something “will not last very long,” they think “it will last about as long as a sugary pastry at a school’s door” (eso dura lo que dura un merengue en la puerta de una escuela).
11.Cubans don’t eat hotdogs with “all the trimmings,” they eat them with “all the irons” (con todos los hierros).
12.Cubans don’t think something will “end badly,” they think it will end “like Guatao’s party” (esto va a terminar como la fiesta del Guatao).
13.Cubans don’t “go somewhere reluctantly,” they “go like the cat whose tail is being pinched” (como el gato que le están pellizcando el rabo).
14.Cubans don’t say something is “very far away,” they think it is “where the devil gave the three voices, and no one heard him” (donde el diablo dio las tres voces y nadie le oyó).
15.Cubans don’t say someone “died,” they say “they stretched a leg” (estiró la pata) or “sang the peanut vendor” (cantó el manisero).
16.Cubans don’t “think something is outrageous,” they “throw a mango aggressively” (le zumba el mango).
17.Cubans don’t tell you that “you have been taken for a fool,” they say that “they grabbed your ass” (te cojieron el culo).
18.Cubans are not just “proud,” they “cannot fit another bird seed into their butt” (no le cabe un alpiste en el culo).