A young Cuban émigré surprised his mother with the shock of her life by appearing at her doorstep after eight years apart, in a reunion that he recorded on video and shared on TikTok under the username @lachyrisas.
The 55-second clip shows the son waiting outside the family home until his mother comes out. Upon seeing him, the woman runs towards him, and they embrace for several seconds, filled with tears and a joy that words cannot express.
In the audio of the video, someone is heard trying to calm the emotions of the moment: "Let her vent; it's been a while since they've seen each other... Calm down, kid, calm down. She's here now, there you go, kid."
Published in mid-September, the video has garnered over 63,600 views, 6,729 likes, and 479 comments, with tags such as #cubanosporelmundo, #reencuentro, and #madreslatinas.
The reunion is not an isolated case. TikTok has become one of the platforms where many Cuban emigrants document their returns, often in the form of surprises, creating a stream of viral videos that recurs week after week.
At the beginning of September, a Cuban traveled to the island to see her daughter after eight years of separation. A few days later, another returned as a surprise dressed as a bear for her nephew's birthday, after four years away. And on September 14, the heart-wrenching screams of a mother upon seeing her son surpassed 80,200 views in just a few days.
Behind each of these videos lies the same reality: Cuba is experiencing the greatest exodus in its recent history.
According to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI), 251,221 people left the island in 2024. Between 2021 and that same year, more than 1.79 million Cubans departed the country, and over 850,000 arrived in the United States in less than three years. The Cuban government itself acknowledged that year that around three million of its citizens live abroad.
That massive separation—children leaving mothers, fathers leaving young children—is measured in years, and sometimes in decades, and it is the backdrop that turns each filmed embrace into a mirror in which millions of emigrants see themselves.
The emotional weight of these clips—tears, screams, hugs that seem never to end—makes them highly shareable and extends their reach beyond the Cuban community, resonating with Latino audiences who experience similar separations, as reflected in the hashtag #madreslatinas present in the video by @lachyrisas.
For many of those who commented on the video, the hug on screen is the one they themselves long to give.
Filed under: