A young Cuban identified as Javier Guerrero posted a reel on Facebook that has strongly resonated with his fellow countrymen: in it, he rejects the notion that survival should become the only possible horizon of life for Cubans of his generation.
"I am Cuban and I refuse to let survival define my entire identity. Because lately when you talk to someone, it’s all: 'the power outage, food, making ends meet, the dollar.' Man, of course all that matters, but if you spend 24 hours mentally consumed by the problem, you end up forgetting how to live," Guerrero says in the video.
The reflection does not stop at diagnosis: "Honestly, I refuse to believe that we were born only to endure. I want to build things, learn, improve, and dream big too… why not? Life is tough enough without having to give up on your dreams at such a young age."
The question that Guerrero poses — "Why not dream big?" — is, at its core, a direct challenge to a reality that has been trying for decades to convince Cubans that mere survival is enough.
The video has accumulated over 21,700 views, 1,672 likes, and 58 comments, figures that reflect the resonance it found among those who recognize their own daily exhaustion in those words.
The backdrop is the most severe crisis that Cuba has experienced in decades. Throughout 2026, power outages have lasted between 20 and 87 hours in various regions of the country.
On July 14, for the third time in just eight days, a massive failure in the electrical system left millions of Cubans without power, confirming that the island is experiencing one of its worst energy crises in 67 years.
This is compounded by the chronic shortage of food, medicine, and fuel, along with an exchange rate that reduces a minimum pension to less than 10 dollars a month.
It is in this context that Guerrero's phrase takes on its significance: the enumeration "the current, the food, resolving, the dollar" is not rhetorical, but rather the actual inventory of the conversations that dominate life on the island.
The video is part of a wave of content that Cuban youth have viralized on social media this year, questioning the normalization of suffering as a trait of national identity.
In June, for example, the creator @keki_mami suggested on TikTok that choosing not to show pain does not mean denying it, but rather deciding "not to make suffering part of your identity."
This movement has a clear generational dimension. The young people who have grown up amidst the crisis feel that they are being pressured to give up their aspirations from an early age, and social media has become the space where they collectively process this weight and seek to redefine Cuban identity beyond scarcity.
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