Cuban content creator and YouTuber Rosalia Díaz published a reel on Instagram in which, with sharp irony, she lists the supposed "advantages" of living in Cuba: 36-hour blackouts, salaries that don't cover a carton of eggs, water shortages, censorship on social media, and families diminished by emigration.
The video just over a minute long begins with a phrase that sets the tone for everything that follows: "I always have power, 12, 24, 36 hours straight with electricity. A waste of megawatts."
Each "advantage" listed by Díaz is actually a direct indictment of the major structural ills of the island in 2026.
Regarding salary, as a university graduate, she says: "My university degree has opened many doors for me, and the salary is by no means equivalent to the price of a carton of eggs."
The reality underlying this irony is striking: the official minimum wage in Cuba is 2,100 Cuban pesos per month, and the average salary is around 6,500 CUP—about 13 dollars—while a tray of 30 eggs costs between 3,000 and 4,000 pesos on the informal market.
Doctors and professionals with university degrees are abandoning their professions because their income does not even cover basic food needs, a trend that has intensified in recent months.
Regarding the water shortage, Díaz points out: "Here, you don't accumulate laundry because there's water all month," referring to the outages that have left entire neighborhoods in Havana without running water for more than ten days.
Freedom of expression also gets its turn: "You can express yourself freely both in the streets and on social media, for example. What about that? I can't say that either."
The moment when the creator interrupts herself condenses in seconds what Cuba maintains with severe restrictions and documented cases of detentions for posts on social media.
The ending of the video hits even harder, as it ironizes about mass emigration: “I haven’t had to say goodbye to either my family or my friends, as I haven’t seen them leave one by one, we are very happy here all together, and in the afternoons, we come to the boulevard to watch the sunsets and enjoy a Cuba Libre.”
Cuba lost over a million inhabitants in a year due to emigration, and virtually every family on the island has experienced the farewell of a loved one.
Irony as a form of protest is a growing trend among Cubans on social media. Rosalia Díaz's reel encapsulates in just over a minute what the official discourse minimizes or denies, and the audience's response—thousands of reactions within a few hours—suggests that the message strongly resonated with those who experience it daily.
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