A Cuban resident in Florianópolis, Brazil, was left speechless when the friend she tried to help blocked her on social media for not being able to accommodate her in her home. The protagonist, identified on TikTok as @maikelis910, shared the entire story in a video that has garnered over 16,000 views and has sparked intense debate among Cubans in the diaspora.
It all started when some friends from Cuba called her to ask if it was worth emigrating to Brazil. During the conversation, one of them asked if she could stay at her house until finding a place to rent. The Cuban, who has been living in Santa Catarina for two years and works as a cook from Monday to Friday, explained that her lease limits the number of people in the home and that she simply could not do it.
"I can start looking for a place for you so that when you arrive, you'll have somewhere to stay. I can't take you to live in my house because things don't work that way here," she told her friend.
Far from accepting that response, the friend's husband intervened in the call to discredit what the Cuban was explaining: "Don't believe everything she's telling you because they told us one thing and she's saying another," is heard in the video.
Despite this, the protagonist upheld her offer: to find her a rental before she arrived and that her husband—who works as an Uber driver in Florianópolis—would pick her up at the airport without any issues. The friend replied that she would think about it. Shortly after, she blocked her.
"I didn't say anything bad to her; I simply explained how things worked, that I could help her, that I could support her, but that I couldn't pick her up at my house, and they blocked me," she recounted, visibly bewildered.
In the video, he also debunked one of the most widespread myths among Cubans planning to emigrate to Brazil: that there they "give away money." He clarified that there is the Bolsa Família program, a social assistance initiative for low-income families that requires paperwork with CPF, registration in the CadÚnico, and enrollment in the system, and that it is not automatically available to every newcomer.
The narrator arrived in Brazil from Venezuela, entering through Pacaraima, with the original destination of Curitiba, which, according to her, is "the only place a Cuban knows when leaving Cuba." A fellow countryman she met along the way convinced her to go to Florianópolis, where a Cuban who was already settled helped her find a place to rent and assisted her in settling in. Since then, she claims to have returned the favor to many others: "I have helped everyone I could in this country for nothing in return."
The episode illustrates a recurring tension within the Cuban emigrant community in Brazil, where Cuban asylum requests exceeded 41,900 in 2025, an increase of 88% compared to the previous year. Between January and April 2026, there were another 13,414 new applications, with Curitiba and Florianópolis among the cities with the highest concentration of Cubans.
The protagonist ended the video with resignation: "God knows what He does, whom He places, and whom He takes away."
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