A Spanish woman who shares her life on TikTok under the name @albaricoquer published a 38-second video on Tuesday that has touched the hearts of thousands of Cubans in the diaspora: the second installment of a series in which she recounts what her Cuban husband has taught her about the reality of the island, not from a political perspective, but from a deeply human one.
"There are things that are not learned in books, but by listening to the stories of those who have lived them," she wrote in the video description, making it clear from the outset the tone of the message: personal, emotional, and without ideological flags.
In just over half a minute, the Spanish woman condenses an overview of Cuba that many recognize as their own.
"It taught me that you don’t need to know about politics to understand what a people suffers," she says in the video, before listing the lessons her husband has conveyed to her with the weight of someone who has lived them firsthand.
Among them, that in Cuba one has to perform miracles to obtain basic necessities such as food or medicine, and that "growing up without the ability to choose your future is not freedom."
One of the most heartbreaking images in the narrative is that of Cuban mothers: "There are mothers who live with the anguish of watching their children leave to be able to live and stop merely surviving," she states, giving voice to a pain that many Cuban parents know all too well.
That anguish has concrete figures: between 2021 and 2025, more than a million Cubans emigrated, leaving behind broken families and farewells that leave a lasting mark.
The Spanish text also includes a phrase that sums up decades of subjugation: "The world sees a happy people but is unaware that everything was deceitfully stolen from the Cuban."
And she adds another lesson that her husband conveyed to her about the true cost of living under that system: "The highest taxes are the ones paid with time."
The scarcity described in the video is not a metaphor. According to data from 2025 and 2026, 80% of the Cuban population suffers from food insecurity, 89% live in extreme poverty, and one in three families experienced hunger last year. The shortage of medications reaches 70% of the essential drugs, with 461 out of 651 medications completely unavailable or in low supply.
But the video doesn't end in darkness.
The Cuban husband told her that Cuba "wasn't always like this," that "it was a beautiful place," a nostalgia that resonates with the collective memory of generations who either remember or have inherited the memory of a prosperous island, prior to the regime that transformed it into what it is today.
And he concludes with the phrase that has resonated the most among those who have seen it: "If there is anything they can never take away from Cubans, it is their faith and the desire to return one day to a free Cuba."
"Behind every figure, there are real lives, dreams, and farewells," wrote the Spanish woman at the end of the video, in a phrase that could well serve as the epitaph for all that the Cuban regime has cost its own people.
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