One month eating Maruchan instant noodles, a week sleeping on the floor next to cockroaches, rats walking beside their heads, and thorns that had to be pulled out in the desert while counting to three: a Cuban family summed up their migration journey with humor and emotion to the United States in a video posted on Saturday on TikTok that quickly resonated with the Cuban community abroad.
The clip, lasting almost two minutes, was uploaded by the profile @713_liaa and uses the viral format "We went through so much on the journey that..." to reminisce, with laughter and nostalgia, about episodes that at the time tested the physical and emotional limits of the family, consisting of at least three members.
"We take this video with a bit of humor considering how difficult and painful those days were. Today, we feel proud to have achieved the American dream, but we don’t forget everything we went through to be here," they wrote in the video description.
One of the most harrowing moments was led by the father: during the nights, he refused to sleep to keep watch over the others, because the rats—“this big,” said one of the women, opening her arms—would walk right by their heads.
"We slept on the floor, and he stayed awake so that we could sleep because there were rats the size of this, walking beside us, over our heads and everything, and he didn't sleep to watch over our dreams," he recounted.
One of them almost fell into a ravine during the journey, as another family member recounts with nervous laughter.
Upon finally crossing the border, the young man from the family wanted to take a photo to celebrate the achievement. The mother’s response was immediate: "Child, what photo are you talking about? Don’t be ridiculous, you always do this."
The journey did not end with the crossing. The family was taken to a "hielera", the term used by Cuban migrants to describe the short-term processing cells of the U.S. Border Patrol, known for their low temperatures and concrete benches.
The conditions in those facilities have been documented by Human Rights Watch as overcrowded spaces, without beds, with lights on 24 hours a day, and temperatures that induce severe anxiety, especially in individuals with claustrophobia.
The extreme circumstances described by the family — desert with thorny vegetation, nights spent on the ground, passage through the "icebox" at the border — are characteristic of the Central and North American corridor — Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico — which thousands of Cubans have traversed in recent years to reach the southern border of the United States. Migrants from the island have led the migratory flow through Honduras, with thousands of people crossing that country by land in search of the same destination.
Other Cubans have shared similar experiences on social media. A woman narrated her odyssey to reach the U.S. by crossing 13 countries, and a Cuban influencer who spent 18 days in the process before arriving in Miami, in testimonies that blend pain with the determination of those who chose to leave the island.
The video by @713_liaa concludes with a phrase that sums it all up: "But we are already here."
La travesía de esta familia es solo una de las miles de historias que marcan el camino de los cubanos hacia Estados Unidos. Sigue toda la actualidad migratoria en nuestra sección de
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