”Tell It To Me Singing.” On Diaspora, Community and Cuban-American Stories

The first time I heard the phrase Tell it to me singing , I was in college. I called my best friend Tony, who, like me, is Cuban American and grew up in Miami, and he answered the phone, “Tell it to me singing!” “Huh?” I said. “It means ‘¡Dímelo cantando!’” I knew what it meant, but I didn’t know why he would answer the phone that way. So he explained: it’s like saying, “What’s new?” or “What’s up?” and it’s how a lot of older Cubans would answer the phone back in the day. “You’ve never heard it?” he asked. Nope. Somehow I’d made it all the way to age nineteen or twenty without hearing that particular Cuban catchphrase. I’d heard so many others. My father used to stand at the front door when we were late for school and yell, “Ponte las pilas!” (Put in your batteries!) Translation: Get it in gear! If there was drama going down in the neighborhood, my aunt would say “Que arroz con mango!” (What a rice with mango!) Translation: What a mess! Or, more to the point: What a shitshow! And, one of my personal favorites, which my father would say, whenever he ran into a friend somewhere, is “¿Que volá?” (What flies?) Or, for some extra rhyming fun, “¿Que volá, petit poi?” (What flies, little pea?) Translation: What’s new? Every culture and every language has its own idioms, sayings. Cubans call them dichos or, as my father recently taught me, dicharachos. They’re the “He’s pulling your leg” or “Stop beating around the bush” of Cuban Spanish. Dimelo cantando , my father also informed me, probably came from a 1950s Cuban television show of the same name, in which viewers sent in requests for advice on personal problems and the host delivered said advice via song—he, quite literally, told it to them singing. I hope this is a novel about storytelling—about the stories we’ve been told that may or may not be true, the stories we try to convince ourselves are true. So how had I never heard the dicho “Dímelo […]

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