A young Cuban known on Instagram as “meli creando con el corazón” posted a video highlighting the extreme situation of her neighbor Ani, a 65-year-old woman who single-handedly cares for her bedridden son and elderly mother, lacking resources, without a mattress, and without her own pots to cook.
"Today I am going to raise my voice and show the sad reality of some neighbors of mine, whom I have known my whole life and knew were going through a very precarious situation, but I never imagined I would encounter something like this," said the young woman in the reel posted last Wednesday.
Ani worked for 40 years, but she had to leave her job to care for her two family members. "I had to stop working to help my son and my mother. I have no one to take care of me," she shared before the camera.
His son Leonardo, 46 years old, suffered multiple brain infections that left the left side of his body immobilized. Later, chikungunya affected his right side. Today, he neither speaks nor walks. His mother, on the other hand, suffers from cerebral ischemias that, according to Ani, "increase day by day."
The conditions of the home shown in the video are devastating: the family sleeps on bare springs and cardboard, they do not have a refrigerator, the pots are broken or borrowed, and the washing machine was also borrowed. "I only have the ball, and for that, there's nothing to cook with," Ani explained.
The content creator brought some initial supplies, including a raincoat that had been donated for a deceased girl named Anita, whose family had given permission to redirect it to someone in greater need. "Seeing the situation of such beloved neighbors completely broke my heart," she confessed.
In the video description, the young woman specified what she urgently needs: "I only ask for a decent mattress where they can sleep, and I will bring them plenty of food, especially with preservatives because they don’t have a refrigerator or pots to cook."
The case of Ani is not an exception. Cuban elderly face abandonment and precariousness in a context where the regime itself acknowledged in March 2026 that it does not have sufficient budget to care for all vulnerable individuals.
The Family Assistance Service receives between seven and eight new requests daily and has increased from serving 59,000 people in 2023 to approximately 67,000 by mid-2025. The budget allocated for social assistance in 2026 was just 5,981 million Cuban pesos, equivalent to about 14,600 dollars, a negligible amount compared to the scale of the demand.
39% of Cuban retirees receive the minimum pension of 1,528 pesos monthly, an amount that is insufficient to cover basic needs such as food, hygiene, and medications. The massive emigration of young people has emptied homes and care networks, leaving thousands of elderly individuals alone and without support.
Similar cases of Cubans mobilizing to help families in crisis have multiplied on social media, where civic solidarity fills the gaps left by what the State cannot —or does not want to— guarantee.
The young woman closed her video with a direct message to her neighbor: "Ani, I am raising my voice for you. Stay strong."
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