A clip of just 24 seconds posted on Monday on TikTok by the Cuban Lisandra (@lisi.rodriguez3) captures with unusual rawness the pain that accompanies those who leave the island, and has struck a deep chord among thousands of Cubans both inside and outside the country.
The video of Lisandra on TikTok features a farewell set to a song whose lyrics speak of parting and reunion: "And your love will bring spring, and a new life to learn, nothing will ever be the same as yesterday, when we meet again."
The author herself summarized in a comment what many feel but few express so clearly: "Everyone talks about the beautiful feeling you get when you arrive, but the feeling when you leave is horrible."
The phrase encapsulates an experience shared by hundreds of thousands of Cuban families fragmented by emigration, and it explains why the video accumulated over 34,800 views and more than 1,000 reactions in just a few days.
The phenomenon is not isolated. In June, the Camagüey native Naila Verdecia published a farewell clip featuring family in Cuba that garnered over 6,600 views and 334 reactions within a few hours, accompanied by the viral phrase “no one counts the time for saying goodbye to your loved ones in Cuba.”
In April, a Cuban mother residing in the United States said goodbye to her son at the bus station in Havana with words that shook the diaspora: "I feel like the worst mother in the world because I have to leave him again".
This month, the farewell video of Raidel Ramírez, originally recorded in 2023, was rediscovered and surpassed 173,000 views, highlighting that the pain of departure does not fade.
TikTok has become, since 2025, the main space for collective catharsis for the Cuban diaspora, where farewells and reunions go viral constantly and generate waves of empathy among Cubans around the world.
The backdrop of these videos is the largest migration crisis in recent Cuban history: between 2021 and 2024, more than 1.79 million Cubans left the island, reducing the country's effective population to between 8.6 and 8.8 million inhabitants, levels not seen since the 1980s.
In 2024 alone, it is estimated that 545,011 Cubans left the country, and in the first four months of 2026, Cubans accounted for 58% of all asylum requests in Brazil, surpassing Venezuelans for the first time.
This pain has a specific name in Cuban culture: “the sparrow”, a colloquial term for migration grief, a process of multiple losses—family, identity, support network—that generates anxiety, guilt, and distant mourning for both those who leave and those who remain.
Thirty-eight percent of Cuban families have at least one member living abroad, and separations often last between two and seven years, according to data from the research dossier on the Cuban exodus.
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