Leah Reyes, Miss Teen Earth Cuba 2025, joined from Miami in a humanitarian aid initiative for vulnerable individuals in Cuba, coordinated with digital content creator Robert Evangelista, who documented the delivery of food and basic products to more than 40 families on the island.
Evangelista published the first video of the social work on Instagram last Friday, describing the action as unprecedented: never before had a beauty queen made such a donation. On Sunday, she posted a second part that completed the record of the deliveries.
Among the delivered products were staples such as rice, powdered milk, sugar, spaghetti, mashed potatoes, croquettes, minced meat, hot dogs, yogurt, cartons of eggs, oil, coffee, mayonnaise, and bread. The images show elderly individuals, the sick, and workers receiving the food with deep emotion.
Among the beneficiaries, a teacher described her situation bluntly: "Life is day to day just like all Cubans live it, in the struggle and moving forward." The same woman added that she had been without electricity for more than 15 hours at the time she received the assistance and that, despite being sick and barely able to walk, she had to continue working.
Another beneficiary, who had a hip fracture, received the food visibly emotional and thanked the initiative with words that summed up the feelings of many: "I have no words to express what they are doing for us."
Leah Reyes encouraged action from her platform as a beauty queen. In the video, she expressed the weight she feels in representing her country: "Being Miss means waking up each day and knowing that the people, my country I represent, many have lost hope. But I know that very soon, everything will change. We are ready."
Evangelista, for his part, explained the motivation behind the project: "As a Cuban, it truly affects me to see this. It affects me to see the sadness, the silence, the fear, the hunger. It's seeing a people submerged and oppressed without the right to speak up."
The initiative is set against the backdrop of the severe humanitarian crisis affecting Cuba, with power outages exceeding 15 to 20 hours a day in many areas of the country, a critical shortage of food and fuel, and a widespread deterioration of living conditions that hits the most vulnerable the hardest.
Leah Reyes was crowned Miss Teen Earth 2025 in India in August of last year, becoming the first Cuban to win this international title. Since then, she has used her platform to raise awareness about the situation of the Cuban people, summed up in a phrase from the first video: "Not having freedom is not having life. It is living in silence. It is living without hope."
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