A Cuban resident in Spain arrived on the island after 10 years without seeing her father and experienced a distressing moment when she couldn't find him among the crowd at the airport exit, as shown in a video shared on TikTok last Thursday.
The protagonist, identified as Obadele Oni Shango (@obadeleonishango), exits the airport and begins to call out for her father amid the crowd: "Dad? Come here, come here." For a few seconds, she cannot find him, and the anxiety becomes evident on her face.
Finally, he finds him, they look at each other, and embrace in a reunion filled with emotion that was captured in the two-minute and 25-second clip.
In the video description, the author wrote: "After 10 years without seeing my father, today I get to hug him again with the blessing of Almighty God who granted me the opportunity to feel that warm embrace once more. There are many mixed emotions."
The video mentions that Obadele traveled from Spain, where he paid 90 euros to access a VIP lounge before boarding his flight to Cuba.
This reunion is part of a sustained trend on TikTok during 2025 and 2026, where emigrated Cubans document their reunions with family members on the island after years of separation. The videos gather anywhere from thousands to tens of millions of views and reflect the human impact of mass Cuban emigration.
In May, a mother waited four years at Holguín airport to embrace her son in a scene that exceeded 42,400 views. Another Cuban who returned from Uruguay after three years accumulated over 407,100 views with his reunion.
The backdrop of these scenes is the massive Cuban emigration that began in earnest in 2021, regarded as one of the largest migration waves in Latin America in decades. More than a million Cubans have left the island since that year, decreasing the effective population of the country from approximately 11.3 million to an estimated 8.6 to 8.8 million by 2025.
Spain has established itself as one of the main destinations for this diaspora, with over 160,000 registered Cuban residents and at least 27,000 new registrations in 2025.
The ten-year separation documented in Obadele's video represents one of the longest periods recorded in these recent viral clips, amplifying the emotional impact of the scene and explaining the reaction of his followers, who left nearly 1,500 reactions and around a hundred comments within a few days.
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