A Cuban grandmother experienced a moment of pure emotion when her family member, residing abroad, brought her chicharrones to Cuba. The 23-second clip, published yesterday on TikTok by Lisaris García (@lisaris_garod), captured the overwhelmed reaction of the elderly woman to a food that has become an unreachable luxury for most Cubans.
In the video, the grandmother can be heard saying, "take it easy, but not one, two – let's have more of that," a phrase that says it all: she eats the chicharrones with delight and asks for more, unable to hold back.
The act of bringing chicharrones from abroad today carries immense importance in Cuba, both emotionally and materially. Pork production on the island has collapsed from 200,000 tons to just 9,000 tons, as the regime itself admitted in April 2025.
That collapse is directly reflected in prices: the pound of pork in the informal market surpassed 1,400 Cuban pesos at the end of 2024, compared to about 16 pesos in earlier times. A retiree from Santiago de Cuba summed it up bluntly in December of that year: "cracklings are a thing of the past."
Official prices also offer no relief. The pound of pork shoulder in Havana rose from 580 pesos in December 2023 to 980 pesos in February 2025, an increase of 68.9% in just over a year, according to data from the National Office of Statistics and Information.
In the face of shortages, many Cubans have turned to substitute recipes like the so-called "yucca peel chicharrones," documented on social media since late 2023, or "congrís without beans," adaptations that reflect the severity of the food crisis.
The video by Lisaris García is part of a growing trend on TikTok: Cubans who have emigrated returning to the island and documenting emotional family reunions filled with gifts and food brought from abroad. A reunion of a Cuban living in Uruguay with his mother surpassed 407,100 views this month, and another father who reunited with his children after six years accumulated 261,000 views in July 2025.
This wave of videos reflects both the magnitude of the Cuban migration exodus, which has been especially intense between 2021 and 2024, and the depth of the scarcity faced by those who remain on the island, where even cooking has become more difficult due to prolonged power outages and the lack of liquefied gas that have forced many to return to using firewood and stoves from the 1980s.
In that context, the grandmother's reaction upon biting into a chicharrón is not just a sweet moment: it is a reflection of what scarcity means for millions of Cubans who have gone for years without access to foods that once were part of their daily life.
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