A Cuban resident in Santiago de Chile recalled painful memories from the Special Period by sharing an experience from his childhood that resonated with thousands of compatriots: as a child, he would follow foreign tourists to collect the wrappers of gum and candies that they threw away.
I had never tried chewing gum. What I collected was the paper.
"My daughter doesn't want to believe me," says Johnny Blandón González at the beginning of the video published on Instagram, as he reminisces about a pastime that, for many Cuban children of the 90s, became a source of entertainment.
"When I was a child in Cuba, around 1991, since there weren’t these kinds of sweets, we kids would follow tourists around and collect this type of candy wrappers," he recounts.
The wrappers ended up stored in notebooks and were exchanged among the children like trading cards. The value wasn't in what they had contained, as for many, trying those products was simply impossible, but rather in their colors, designs, and even the scent they still retained.
"That was the fun for us kids in Cuba. When they threw away the candies that they could actually buy, we would collect them. And of course, I didn’t taste anything, it was just for collecting," he recalls.
There is a detail from that childhood that still lingers in his memory: the scent of the wrappers.
"I used to smell the wrappers of the gum and felt that little foreign scent, and I loved it. I had never tried gum," she confessed.
Decades later, the memory is difficult to explain even within his own family. His daughter, raised in a completely different reality, couldn't believe that such things were part of her father's childhood.
But for many Cubans who watched the video, there was nothing incredible about the story.
The post triggered an avalanche of comments from people who claimed to have done exactly the same thing during their childhood in Cuba.
"Cuban here, I confirm, I also had my collection in the early 90s. The fun was exchanging little slips of paper with the other kids. What a degrading misery we have lived," wrote a user.
Another comment added a revealing detail about the peculiar value those wrappers held among the children: "And if they retained the scent, they were worth more when it came to trading them."
A third Cuban recalled that he was searching for papers directly among the waste in front of a store where products were sold for dollars.
"At that time, no Cuban could afford to buy even a piece of gum. More or less the same as now, misery has always been among us," he commented.
Even a person who visited Cuba in 1990 shared an even more extreme memory from those years: some Cuban women, he claimed, asked him not to throw away the gum after chewing it so they could keep it and consume it later with sugar.
"I don't know what you all think, my people, but honestly, what they did to us is beyond words," reflected Blandón González in reference to the Cuban regime.
Moreover, in his opinion, that crisis never ended.
"It is still in the Special Period because that period never ends in Cuba," he stated.
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