A Cuban mother identified as Griselda Tarrago Escobar abandoned the house that was donated to her within less than 24 hours after receiving it, reportedly in an attempt to sell it, according to publicly denounced by content creator Héctor Lorenzo on his social media.
The story began in mid-April when the humanitarian project "My City Has a Little Prince" received a plea for help regarding the situation of Griselda and little Natacha Montenegro Tarrago, a six-year-old girl who suffers from bronchial asthma and hematological disorders, and had been without medication for about seven months.
The original home of both had a broken roof, unstable electricity, and they cooked with a wood stove. The solidarity campaign, driven by Lorenzo through his page "Soy Holguín" along with the project El Principito, raised a total of 234,000 Cuban pesos with which a new house was purchased in El Llano, San Andrés.
In the delivery video, Griselda appeared emotional: "I'm already in my little house and I'm very happy, thanks to you," she said in front of the camera. She also thanked Lorenzo and all the donors "from the bottom of her heart."
However, within a few hours, everything changed. The woman claimed that she wanted to return to her community, that there was nothing to cook with there, and that "after all, the little house is already mine", she can be heard saying in the video.
According to Lorenzo, Griselda did not bring the donated food to the new house, she did not bring the sheets, and she started complaining that they had no food or water, even though the house had pots, a refrigerator, electricity in the morning, and a water well next to it with a tank that cost the activists 23,000 pesos.
A collaborator of Lorenzo had handed over 20,000 Cuban pesos at the time of the delivery, an event that was captured on video. Griselda dismissed that amount disparagingly, as Lorenzo recounted in his post.
The beneficiary also insulted Lorenzo's wife and Yoana from the El Principito project, using words that the content creator described as "very ugly" and chose not to repeat. More than five neighbors from the area testified about what happened and were, according to Lorenzo, "perplexed and very upset."
She planned everything from the very beginning. She didn't intend to stay in the house, wrote Lorenzo in his public complaint.
Given the situation, Lorenzo, the project El Principito, and the main collaborator decided to close the residence and find another family in need of it.
It is unacceptable that they are going to sell or do who knows what with a house that was bought for a sick girl, she pointed out.
The case is part of a growing trend in Holguín where citizen groups fill the void left by the State in response to the housing crisis, which in 2026 registers a deficit of more than 900,000 homes in Cuba.
The government only fulfilled 22% of its construction plan in 2025 —2,382 out of 10,795 planned homes— due to shortages of cement, steel, and wood.
In the same weeks, other similar initiatives achieved positive results: an influencer donated houses to homeless elderly people in Holguín and Cubans raised over 1,137,000 pesos for a pair of siblings with serious illnesses.
"We feel used, deceived, and above all, very sad. But this experience has taken away my desire to do something like this again," concluded Lorenzo, whose post accumulated over 166,000 views and more than 4,000 comments.
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