luchar

What it means

1. 1.

   To hustle: to get by through informal work, trading, favours and improvisation. Estar en la lucha is the standard answer to 'how are things?' and means, roughly, surviving.

2. 2.

   Used transitively with a direct object, to obtain something by those means: luchar un pollo, luchar unos pesos. This transitive use is the distinctively Cuban part.

Literally: To fight, to struggle.

Examples with translations

• ¿Cómo andas? — Ahí, en la lucha.

  How's it going? — You know. Getting by.

  Note: Almost a ritual exchange. It says nothing specific and everyone understands it.

• Voy a ver si lucho unos huevos para la comida.

  I'm going to see if I can scare up some eggs for dinner.

Where it comes from

The ordinary verb 'to struggle', absorbed into economic vocabulary during the Special Period of the 1990s. The phrase la lucha carries a deliberate echo of official revolutionary rhetoric, and Cubans use it with full awareness of the irony.

First attested: 1990s in this sense

Other forms

Similar terms:

inventar, bisnear