A Cuban who identifies on TikTok as La Pauty (@lapauty0) posted a nearly ten-minute video on April 8, in which she openly defends Cuban jineteras, includes herself in that category, and calls for not judging the women who left the island hand in hand with a foreigner without having experienced the misery that drove them to do so.
"I will raise my voice for the jineteras because I include myself. I will raise my voice for those of us who left Cuba with a yuma, with someone who belonged to another nationality," asserts the creator from the first moment of the video, using the Cuban slang term to refer to Western foreigners.
La Pauty's speech begins with childhood and spares no details.
Describe having gone to school in worn-out shoes, having brought water with sugar and bread with oil as a snack while other girls brought soft drinks and bread with ham, and having been looked down upon by classmates and even rejected by a teacher when offering her snack.
"Nobody talks about the pain of having to take a glass of water with sugar to school along with hard bread from the store with oil," he says in the video.
The Cuban also recounts having been taunted for not having deodorant or foot cream: "Still, no one talks about the stares when one would have body odor because there was no deodorant, not even the stick kind."
For La Pauty, those who criticize the jineteras are precisely the ones who have never experienced that deprivation.
"Those who talk like that are the ones whose mommy and daddy brought their little plates to the table every day, breakfast in bed," he points out, directly addressing those who had a childhood with access to products that are a privilege in Cuba.
Its central message is an appeal to empathy: "Only those who have gone hungry know what it is to pick up a piece of bread from the trash," he states, and adds that before judging a woman for her past, "first wash your mouth."
The debate about jineterismo is recurring and polarized on the social media of the Cuban diaspora. The term became popular during the Special Period of the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union deprived Cuba of its main subsidies, and many women resorted to relationships with tourists as a survival strategy.
In June 2025, another Cuban in the United States used the term virally but with a different twist, to describe relatives on the island who demand luxuries from emigrants: “There comes a time when you become the tourist and they, the family, become the jinetera.”
La Pauty does not renounce her history or her decisions; rather, she asserts them as a rational response to a structural poverty that the Cuban system imposed for decades.
"I live my life today as I please," she says, emphasizing that everything she has she achieved on her own: "Everything I have is thanks to me, to who I am, and those who know me understand the heart I have."
The video concludes with a reflection on empathy that, according to the creator, should guide any judgment: "When I see a child in those conditions that I also experienced, before criticizing, I first take off what I have and give it to them if I can at that moment."
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