Whenever I stayed at a hotel in Cuba, I discovered that speaking Spanish put me at a disadvantage. Cubans despise themselves so much that anybody they identify as being a fellow Spanish-speaker gets treated like shit. I was forced to address the hotel staff in English because even though nobody understood a word I was saying, there was a chance of getting my meaning across through gesticulation and a slow repetition of separate words. Switching to Spanish, on the other hand, guaranteed that any request of mine would be ignored.
People who can be visually identified as “Hispanic non-white” were in an even worse situation because that merited them utter contempt on the part of self-hating Cubans.
This is a very Soviet thing: everything that is even remotely similar to “us” is despised. Everything completely foreign is worshipped for escaping from the taint of “us.”
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