Jaba
A bag — the carrier bag every Cuban takes out of the house in case something turns up for sale.
Related lesson: Cuban Spanish: A Survival Guide.
Hear it in context
Coge una jaba, que si hay pollo hay que traerlo.
Take a bag — if there's chicken, we'll need to carry it.
¿Me das una jabita para el pan?
Could you give me a little bag for the bread?
Salió con la jaba vacía y volvió con mangos y dos panes.
She went out with an empty bag and came back with mangoes and two loaves.
What It Actually Means
La jaba is a bag: the nylon or plastic carrier that lives folded in a pocket and comes out when something appears. Standard Spanish would say bolsa, and Cubans understand it, but jaba is what they say. The word carries a whole economic habit with it — andar con la jaba is to move through the day prepared, because supply is unannounced and a queue can form for anything.
Where It Comes From
From the Antilles, before Spanish got there. Jaba enters the language from Taíno, where it named a basket or crate woven from fibre, and the dictionaries still carry that sense — a slatted crate for fruit. Cuba kept the word and shrank the object: from a woven basket to a plastic carrier bag, over five centuries, with no break in the chain. It sits alongside the rest of the island’s Taíno inheritance: hamaca, huracán, tabaco, ají, casabe, batey.
How Natives Use It
Constantly, and mostly in the singular with an indefinite article: una jaba, la jaba, jabita when asking for one across a counter. It attaches to the vocabulary of provisioning — el mandado (the shopping), la bodega (the ration shop), la cola (the queue) — and to the verb that governs all of them, resolver.
Common Pitfall
Do not expect one to be handed to you. Bags are not a given in Cuban shops, and turning up at the agromercado without a jaba is the mistake every visitor makes once. Beyond Cuba the word narrows back to its crate sense or disappears entirely, so in Madrid ask for una bolsa — and note the near-miss with Peru’s jama, which is food, not the thing you carry it in.