A Cuban émigré who posts on TikTok as @elidanceee shared a video yesterday in which she recounts with deep emotion the moment when she saw Havana from a Caribbean cruise after years of not returning to the island.
"I never imagined that seeing you from a cruise would break me so much inside," says the young woman in the one-minute clip, which starkly describes the experience of being physically close to Cuba without being able to touch it or reunite with her family.
In her narration, @elidanceee recounts feeling the island "so close that I could see it completely from a distance, but so far away that I couldn't touch it."
While those around her enjoyed their vacation, all she could think about was something else: "the hugs I’ve been missing, from my family, in the years that have passed since I last set foot there."
The author describes how seeing Havana from the sea suddenly brought back "memories, childhood, voices, scents, moments that continue to live within me even as time passes."
"I saw you from afar and felt my heart tighten," he confesses in the video, which concludes with a reflection that resonated with thousands of Cubans in the diaspora: "I understood that one never really stops loving their homeland because the homeland lives within you."
The video from @elidanceee is part of a trend that has been recurring on TikTok since 2025: emigrated Cubans who, while cruising on ships along routes that hug the northern coast of Cuba, capture the moment they see Havana from the sea and share it as an emotional testimony.
The most impactful case so far has been that of the user @bisbelis, whose video posted on May 21 surpassed 261,000 views and 11,000 likes. Her phrase "very close, so my mom can see it" became a symbol of the collective experience of the diaspora.
In October 2025, another video filmed from the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas off the coast of Havana also sparked hundreds of nostalgic reactions among Cubans on social media.
This experience carries a particular symbolic weight because, since 2019, major shipping companies have not made port calls in Cuban ports due to sanctions intensified by the Trump administration, which ended a brief period of openness during which lines like Royal Caribbean and Carnival did dock in Havana between 2016 and 2019.
In 2025 and 2026, shipping companies like MSC, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian do not include Havana as a port of call in their Caribbean itineraries, turning these views from the sea into a poignant metaphor for the Cuban migrant condition: the island visible but inaccessible.
Family separations among Cuban emigrants often extend between two and seven years, and in many cases, elderly relatives pass away without seeing their loved ones abroad again. Reunions like that of parents who returned to Cuba after four years or that of a family reunited after years of separation have also gone viral in recent months, showcasing the two sides of the same wound.
"For every silent pain that one learns to hide until life confronts you with what you miss the most," summarized @elidanceee in their video, a phrase that encapsulates what millions of Cubans abroad feel each time the island appears on the horizon.
Filed under: