A Cuban woman who identifies herself on TikTok as "Alana's mom" (@ailetdiaz_96) shared in a series of three videos how she became paralyzed about four years ago during her migration journey from Nicaragua to the United States, when the van she was traveling in with other Cubans lost control and plunged down a ravine on the outskirts of Veracruz, Mexico.
"Four years ago, I decided to embark on the journey from Nicaragua to the United States along with all the Cubans, with millions of Cubans," the woman recounted in the first of her videos, published on April 29.
According to her account, the journey from Nicaragua to Mexico took about 15 days. Upon arrival, the migrants were taken to areas without communication coverage and were loaded at night into overcrowded vans. Before the accident, the vehicle suffered a flat tire and was stopped by the police, signs that she interprets as warnings that nobody heeded.
"I wrote to my dad at seven in the morning and told him that everything was going well, and I think I fell asleep. From that moment on, I don't remember anything else," she recounted.
Her brain erased the impact. "I know that’s called post-traumatic stress," she explained. She only knows the details from the testimony of those who were with her: "The car lost control and went over a cliff because we were going too fast."
She was transferred to a small hospital where they could not operate on her. She waited four days until her father traveled from Cuba to be with her. Then she was taken to a private hospital where, as she said, "we had to pay for everything, even the sheets." The operation, which took place on the 19th, lasted eight hours and during it, she suffered a cardiac arrest.
The diagnosis was a complete spinal cord injury at the T4 level: total loss of mobility and sensation from the chest down. "From the chest down, I lose all the abdominal muscles, all the muscles in my feet, and all the nerves," he detailed. The consequences include loss of bowel and bladder control, permanent catheter use, recurrent urinary infections, and inability to regulate body temperature. He also suffered a fractured collarbone and pulmonary contusions.
After a month of hospitalization, the woman and her husband lived eight months in Mexico without work or money before deciding to continue to the U.S. The crossing was another ordeal: after crossing the river by boat, they faced a muddy mountain stretch that was almost impossible to climb in a wheelchair.
"I told my husband: leave me here and you go on, because it's impossible," she recalled. At that critical moment, an unknown young Cuban appeared and helped them get through the tough stretch. "A Cuban kid came, and I really don't even remember his name, and he helped us, and thanks to him, we were able to get over that part."
The route taken by this woman was the same one traversed by thousands of Cubans starting in 2021, when Nicaragua eliminated the visa requirement for citizens of the island. This path has witnessed multiple tragedies: three Cubans died in Veracruz in March 2022, six Cuban migrants lost their lives in San Luis Potosí when a bus went off a cliff, and at least 18 migrants died in an accident in Nicaragua in July of that same year.
Despite everything, the woman's attempts to enter the U.S. legally failed. "We went through the entire process to enter legally, but no: nothing was approved for me, neither visa nor parole, nothing was approved," she concluded. She was interviewed by Telemundo while applying for a visa, with no results. Finally, she entered the country irregularly, in a wheelchair, after one of the toughest migration journeys ever documented publicly.
The three videos published between April 29 and May 2 garnered over 88,000 combined views and generated hundreds of supportive comments from the Cuban community, turning their story into a stark testimony of the human cost of forced migration due to the dictatorship.
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