Bisne
A deal, a hustle, a bit of private business — English "business", spelled the way Cuba says it.
Related lesson: Cuban Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Con la pincha sola no alcanza, hay que hacer algún bisne.
A job alone isn't enough — you have to have something going on the side.
Ese es bisnero, te consigue lo que sea.
He's a wheeler-dealer — he can get you anything.
Están en un bisne con las piezas de bicicleta.
They've got something going with bicycle parts.
What It Actually Means
A bisne is a piece of business — a deal, a side line, an arrangement. It ranges from a licensed private trade to a purely informal one, and the word deliberately does not say which. Bisnero is the person who runs them, bisnear the verb. In a country where the salary and the shops have long failed to meet in the middle, the noun names an entire parallel economy without a single technical term.
Where It Comes From
Straight from English business, respelled to Cuban phonetics: the -ss becomes a single s, the final syllable goes, and the word takes Spanish morphology on arrival (bisnero, bisnear). It is one of a small set of anglicisms that reached the island despite six decades of limited contact — proof that trade coins words faster than politics can stop them. The Miami diaspora, in daily contact with English, mostly uses business unaltered; the island naturalised it.
How Natives Use It
Neutrally and constantly, usually with hacer or estar en: hacer un bisne, estar en un bisne, ¿y ese bisne tuyo?. It belongs to the same family as the verbs that surround it — resolver, inventar, luchar, conseguir — and to the vocabulary of the private trades: el cuentapropista, el paladar (the private restaurant, named after a Brazilian soap opera), el timbiriche (the tiny stall). Payment is very often in fula.
Common Pitfall
Do not read it as a confession. Bisne implies enterprise, not crime, and Cubans use it about entirely licensed activity as readily as about the other kind — the ambiguity is a courtesy, not an accusation. Do not use it for a formal company either: that is un negocio or una empresa. And it is not a synonym for Spain’s chanchullo or Argentina’s curro in its dodgy sense; those name the swindle, while bisne names the effort.