A Cuban resident in Florida known on TikTok as WHITESHARK (@whiteshark_i220a) posted a video over nine minutes long on Wednesday, in which he criticizes fellow compatriots who have been in the United States for just two or three years and are already complaining that the country "is for slaves" or that "money is not enough."
The creator, who claims to have arrived in the U.S. four years ago after spending 39 in Cuba, sums up his stance with a direct question: how can someone who wasted three decades under communism demand immediate results from a country that welcomed him from scratch?
"The logic of the Cuban who complains about the United States is so illogical: they spend twenty, twenty-five, thirty, even fifty years wasting their time in Cuba... and they only spend two or three years here and start complaining that they don't have time, that this country is for slaves, that their life is passing them by, and that the money isn't enough for anything," he states in the video.
To illustrate his argument, WHITESHARK proposes a thought experiment: imagine a European tourist—German, Italian, French, or Chinese—arriving in Cuba at the age of forty with not a single dollar in their pocket.
His conclusion is that that person would have to return to their country in two or three months, because the communist system does not allow for growth from scratch: first it limits you, and then it confiscates what you produce.
The contrast with the U.S., he says, is radical: "If you have the ability to reinvent yourself, to be smart, here you have all the tools to grow, to apply for a loan, to set up a business, to become an entrepreneur and start generating income."
The creator acknowledges that he considers himself "a starving man" in relative terms, but emphasizes that in four years he has achieved more than in his 39 years in Cuba.
It also mentions that in Miami there are Cubans who have been in the country for less than five years, some still without residency, who have already accumulated over a million dollars.
"This is a country for people who have the ability to get ahead, people with character, not lazy people," he stated.
WHITESHARK uses the hashtag #i220a, which identifies thousands of Cubans who arrived during the 2022-2023 migration wave and found themselves in a legal limbo with a migration supervision order without definitive status, a community very active on TikTok that shares experiences of adaptation and work.
The debate raised by the video is not new in the Cuban diaspora. Other creators have expressed similar messages, such as Luis Sánchez (@bethechange80), who went viral with the phrase "people came here to work, not to party or have a good time."
The Cuban community in Florida is divided between those who acknowledge the real difficulties of exile—high living costs, language barriers, exhausting work hours, and the pressure to send remittances to the Island—and those, like WHITESHARK, who believe that complaining is unjustifiable given the contrast with life under the dictatorship.
The creator himself concludes his reflection with the words his grandparents repeated to him before emigrating: "There, you can find everything and you can get what you desire, but you have to put in the effort and you have to work like a mule."
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