A Cuban woman who works cleaning empty apartments in a condominium in the United States posted a video on TikTok that summarizes in less than two minutes the contrast between the products that are discarded in the United States and the scarcity her family suffers in Cuba.
The content creator, identified as @familia.reyes792, shows in the video the items that tenants leave behind when moving out, which she is required to dispose of: a mattress without stains or tears, sealed yogurts, and what she describes as medications that are also unopened.
"Look at a practically new mattress because it doesn't appear dirty or damaged or torn or anything, gentlemen," he says while walking through the empty apartment.
It explains that on the sidewalks, it is common to leave items for others to pick up for free, but within the condominium, that is not possible: everything that tenants leave behind must go to the trash through the maintenance service, and she cannot keep any of it.
"It makes me suffer to have to throw all this away, things that I cannot take home with me because they belong to other people," he confesses.
What pains him the most is throwing away food and sealed products. He opens one of the containers to check that it is intact —and confirms that it is— but he still has to discard it. "Look, all of this is sealed, gentlemen, all of this is going to the trash," he laments.
The strongest emotional blow comes when he relates what he sees to the reality of his home in Cuba: "Imagine, at my house, they've had to substitute oil with lard because there's no way to find it—no, it’s not that there’s no possibility, it’s that there’s nowhere to buy it. Imagine having to throw all these things away."
The mention of oil is not incidental. Cuba is experiencing in 2026 a severe food crisis characterized by the scarcity of this product: the liter of sunflower oil reached 2500 Cuban pesos in Havana in July and surged to range between 4000 and 7000 pesos in various regions of the country in August.
The Minister of Food Industry, Alberto López Díaz, admitted in June that the rationed basket had not distributed oil, chicken, or yogurt so far this year.
Due to the shortage of oil, many Cubans turned to pork fat as a substitute, but by August that alternative also started to run low. The desperation reached such a point that, in early September, a truck loaded with oil was reported looted in Havana.
The video from @familia.reyes792 joins a recurring phenomenon among the Cuban diaspora on social media: the contrast between the products discarded in the United States and the extreme scarcity in Cuba, where — as another Cuban demonstrated just days earlier — everything is reused down to the last container to avoid wasting anything.
"It's not easy, with the need in our country, to have to see here that one has to throw all these things in the trash," the woman concludes, her voice trembling.
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