It was almost two in the morning when Jasiel (@jasielacosta23) turned on the camera, sat in front of the phone with teary eyes, and recorded a video that has touched the hearts of thousands of Cubans: he couldn’t sleep thinking about his daughter, who remains in Cuba while he tries to build a future in Miami.
"It's going to be two in the morning, and it's another night awake thinking about my daughter who is over there in Cuba. It’s sad, and it’s painful," the clip begins. In nearly three minutes, Jasiel speaks with a broken voice, no filters, and unashamed to show his tears. In the description of the video, he wrote: "Crying doesn't make me less of a man."
The message he conveys to other Cuban parents is clear and straightforward: don’t make the same mistake he did. “Skip that phase of making such a huge sacrifice for your children, don’t do it. Just being with them makes them happy, believe me,” he says, looking into the camera.
Towards the end of the video, Jasiel speaks directly to his daughter, as if she could hear him from the other side of the screen: "I love you, I love you my little love, and I want you to know that I am doing all of this for you, but sometimes I don't have the strength." A phrase that encapsulates the impossible dilemma faced by thousands of Cuban families separated by emigration.
What followed was an avalanche of comments from fathers and mothers who recognized their own pain in Jasiel's. One shared that he left his daughter when she was seven, and now she is eleven, having missed her birthdays and not being there to see her lose her baby teeth. Another recounted that his son, whom he left when he was two and is now about to turn eight, says to him: "Dad, I don't want anything else, I just want you to be here with me, take me to school, give me food, and play with me."
There are those who have gone seven years without seeing their child. And some who have been away for four years and, although they say they do not regret it because they can support their family financially, acknowledge that “part of their childhood has gone by without being able to hug them.” One mother went even further: she returned to Cuba after more than a year because “she fell into depression every single day” and could no longer bear the distance, even though she knows that the island “is getting worse every day.”
Among the comments, there was also space for collective reflection. "All of us who emigrated have a book full of sadness," wrote one follower. Another noted, "One does not stop being a good father or mother by making these decisions, and it hurts a lot." And someone else summarized what many feel but few express out loud: "No one understands that pain until they live it."
The video of Jasiel is not an isolated case. Cuba is experiencing the largest exodus in its history, with over 251,000 people having emigrated in 2024 according to the National Office of Statistics and Information, and a population that has fallen to less than 9.75 million inhabitants. Behind each number is a story like that of this father: sleepless nights, screens taking the place of hugs, and the unanswered question of whether it was worth it.
TikTok has become the confessional for that generation of emigrants, and Jasiel's video is just one more in a long series of heartbreaking testimonies from Cuban parents separated from their children that go viral because they touch on a wound that never heals. "Every night is a disaster," Jasiel said. And thousands of Cubans, from Miami to every corner of the world, know exactly what he is talking about.
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