A Cuban young woman living in the Canary Islands, Spain, identified on TikTok as @rosemaryyym, posted a video humorously listing three habits that, according to her, reveal her Latina identity: sleeping with the fan on, eating rice every day, and being very intense when meeting new people.
The video, lasting 36 seconds, was published on March 20 and quickly became highly shared among the Latino and Cuban community in the diaspora.
The first of her identifying traits is the dependence on the fan to fall asleep. "I need the noise of a fan to sleep", Rosemary explained in the video, describing a habit that many Cubans and Latinos recognize as their own, regardless of the climate of the country they live in.
The second characteristic is the daily rice, the staple of Cuban cuisine. "For me, a meal without rice feels like something is missing. I mean, rice and I are like this," said the young woman, summarizing in a few words an almost inseparable relationship with the grain that defines much of Caribbean gastronomy.
The third element that Rosemary identifies as unmistakably Latino is its social intensity. According to her, when she meets someone new, she wants to know everything about that person right away: "We meet, and there's a kiss, a hug, a 'how are you,' and 'tell me about your life and your family.' If I know someone, it's like I want to know everything about you. We talk on WhatsApp, how's everything, all good. So I'm very intense about that, to be honest."
At the end of the video, Rosemary invited her followers to share their own identity markers with the question: "Tell me things that give away where you are from."
The video is part of a well-established trend on TikTok under the concept "things that give me away as Latina," where Latin American users list everyday habits and customs that reveal their cultural background, usually in a humorous tone. This trend has generated hundreds of millions of collective views on the platform, particularly resonating with second-generation Latinas in the United States and Europe.
Among Cuban residents in Spain, the phenomenon is particularly active. In April of this year, Aisha Descane went viral on Instagram with a reel about customs that reveal having grown up in a Cuban family—such as eating rice daily, reusing oil containers, or roasting lechón—which accumulated over 127,000 views in less than 24 hours. Other creators like @lachabe97 and jennypg92, both from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, have published similar content about cultural shock and Cuban identity in Spanish territory.
The Canary Islands also have a deep historical connection with Cuba, stemming from the mass emigration of Canarians to the Caribbean island during the 19th and 20th centuries. Canarian Spanish shares phonetic and lexical traits with Cuban Spanish —such as seseo, the aspiration of the 's', and words like "papas" or "muchachos"— which makes the archipelago a particularly welcoming destination for the Cuban diaspora in Spain, allowing expressions of identity, like those of Rosemary, to resonate uniquely there.
Since 2024, and with greater intensity in 2025 and 2026, social media has become for many Cuban women in the diaspora a space for identity assertion where humor and nostalgia blend to keep the culture of origin alive.
Filed under: