The Cuban content creator Daniela López Peña published the second part of her series on cultural clashes with her Mexican boyfriend, Ulises, a nearly two-minute video that humorously summarizes the most notable language misunderstandings in their intercultural relationship.
"Cultural clashes between my Mexican boyfriend and I, a Cuban, part 2. I'll start," Daniela announces at the beginning of the clip, before warning, "I'm going to start off strong."
The first clash it addresses is the word "coger."
In Cuba, the verb is completely neutral: it means to take or grab. "To 'coger' for us Cubans is like, I don't know, I'm going to grab something, grab that for me," explains Daniela. But in Mexico, as she herself acknowledges, "it's something very different, very different," since it has an explicit sexual connotation that left her boyfriend more than surprised.
The second misunderstanding involves the word "cookie."
Daniela recounts that when her boyfriend got upset and said to her, "I'm going to give you a cookie," she interpreted the phrase as a sweet offer. "I thought he was angry but was going to give me a treat. I said, well, it's a chocolate one," she laughs as she shares the story. The reality was quite different: "It wasn't a cookie to eat, it was a damn slap. I learned that the hard way."
The third shock is the word "guagua," so commonplace for any Cuban.
When Daniela said "I'm going to take the guagua," her Mexican boyfriend didn't understand anything. "A guagua and me, a guagua, a dog that... well, I imagine a guagua is barking, a dog," she mimics Ulises' reaction. For Cubans, a guagua simply means the bus. "A guagua, a damn truck. Is it so hard to say truck? Truck, bus," Daniela concludes with irony.
The fourth point of friction is not a word but the volume of voice.
Daniela points out that for Cubans, it’s completely normal to speak loudly. “I talk to this man, and he tells me not to yell at him, and I say I’m not yelling, because if I were yelling, you’d be running away,” she says, making it clear that what feels like a normal conversation to her sounds like an argument to her boyfriend.
This type of content is part of a well-established trend on TikTok where intercultural couples humorously document their everyday differences. Venezuelan women married to Cubans, Uruguayan women, and Colombian women with Cuban boyfriends have created a trend with similar videos, turning misunderstandings of Cuban Spanish into a unique genre of entertainment on social media.
Cuban migration to Mexico has intensified in recent years, leading to more intercultural couples and families who, although they share the language, discover daily that speaking Spanish does not always mean understanding one another.
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