A Cuban resident in England shared on TikTok the items she brought directly from Cuba that she continues to use in her daily life in the UK, in a video that became a gathering point for the emigrant community.
The creator, known as @mare_rycroft, posted a 31-second clip on April 25 titled "Things I Brought from Cuba Part 2", which indicates that she had previously shared a video on the same topic.
Among the objects displayed are a cleaning stick with its cloth, a Cuban coffee maker with its little cups "cubitas," and a bottle of rum Havana Club.
Regarding rum, the creator leaves no doubt: "this is a must-have; every Cuban surely has this in their home."
The coffee maker and the ritual of cafecito are deeply rooted practices in Cuban culture, associated with hospitality, conversation, and domestic life, and in the diaspora, they become a way to reproduce the identity of the home across generations.
The cloth and the mop, for their part, evoke the ingenuity and culture of reuse that defines everyday life in Cuba in the face of chronic product shortages.
At the end of the video, Mare Ryc invites her followers to comment on what objects they keep from their own countries of origin, broadening the conversation beyond Cuba and turning the content into a meeting space for the migrant community in general.
This type of posts is part of a well-established trend among Cubans in the diaspora on TikTok, where sharing items and rituals brought from the island has become a way to express identity, nostalgia, and cultural belonging under hashtags like #cubanosporelmundo.
Other recent examples include a Cuban in England who demonstrated that she continues to use rolls of toilet paper to style her hair, a practice associated with scarcity on the island, or the case of a Cuban who showed how he discarded a pair of Nike sneakers brought from Cuba two years ago, after several repairs, generating a massive response due to the sentimental value of the item.
The unprecedented wave of Cuban migration since 2021 has amplified the symbolic weight of these objects: many recent emigrants arrived with very little luggage, so each item brought from the island carries an emotional and cultural significance that goes far beyond its practical usefulness.
In April, a young Cuban emigrant posted a video in which her mother in Cuba was smelling her grandson's baby clothes as a way to "feel him" from afar, another example of how material objects sustain emotional ties between the island and the diaspora.
The coffee pot, the cloth, and the Havana Club rum displayed by Mare Ryc are neither luxury items nor absolute necessities in the United Kingdom: they are, above all, markers of identity that reproduce Cuban everyday life on British soil.
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