palestino

What it means

1. 1.

   A Cuban from the eastern provinces who has moved to Havana. Used by habaneros, condescendingly, about internal migrants — the standing joke being that they are people without a homeland who cannot be sent back.

2. 2.

   By extension, anything judged unsophisticated or countrified, in the way a Londoner might say provincial.

Examples with translations

• Se le nota el acento, es palestino.

  You can hear it in his accent, he's from the east.

  Note: Rarely neutral. The word carries a sneer even when the speaker means none.

• Aquí nos dicen palestinos y llevamos veinte años en La Habana.

  They still call us outsiders here and we've been in Havana twenty years.

Where it comes from

A Havana coinage of the 1990s, built on the analogy of statelessness and sharpened by Decree 217 of 1997, which restricted residence in the capital and left thousands of eastern migrants living there without legal registration. It is a prejudice word, and Cubans from Oriente resent it.

First attested: 1990s