asere

What it means

1. 1.

   Mate, bro, buddy. The single most recognisably Cuban form of address, used to open a sentence, to close one, or as the whole sentence.

2. 2.

   By extension, a friend or associate spoken about in the third person: un asere mío — a mate of mine.

Examples with translations

• ¿Qué bolá, asere?

  What's up, bro?

  Note: The default Cuban greeting between men who know each other.

• Asere, tremendo lío el que se armó ayer.

  Man, there was one hell of a mess yesterday.

• Eso me lo resolvió un asere del barrio.

  A guy from my neighbourhood sorted that out for me.

Where it comes from

From the ritual language of the Abakuá secret society, itself carried to Cuba by Carabalí (Efik and Efut) captives from the Cross River region. In that vocabulary asere is a salutation, roughly 'I greet you'. It spent most of the twentieth century marked as street and marginal speech before becoming general in the 1990s. The widely repeated claim that it means 'monkey' in Yoruba is folk etymology, usually deployed by people who dislike the word.

First attested: 19th century in Abakuá usage; general Cuban speech from the 1970s

Other forms

Spellings and variants:

acere

Similar terms:

consorte, monina, nagüe