A young Cuban identified on Instagram as @shantl.avs became the voice of thousands of compatriots this Friday with a 36-second reel in which she threatens to give "slippers" to the stork that brought her into the world in Cuba.
"If I catch the stork that brought me to Cuba, look, it’s getting a good smack," the young woman exclaims with an energy that quickly spreads. Her main complaint is clear: the bird did not have the good sense to drop her off in another country. "Do you think she couldn't hold the bag for just two more minutes? I'm not asking for much, just to be left in Mexico, you know. No, she just dropped me here. Here I am in the dark, enduring blackouts. This was never my destiny."
The punchline comes with a biblical reference to Adam and Eve that highlights the absurdity: “I don’t know who lent the rib to create Díaz-Canel, who’s driving me crazy with these blackouts; I can’t stand another one.”
The video gathered thousands of reactions and hundreds of comments in just a few hours, with a wave of Cubans instantly recognizing themselves in the situation.
"Friend, don’t feel alone, we are a million," wrote one user. Another confessed something that is rarely said out loud: "My mom once apologized to me for having me in Cuba." A third comment summed up the collective solidarity with dark humor: "If it were up to us, we would take out the storks with flip-flops for letting us fall here."
One of the comments extended the joke indirectly into politics: "She talks about the stork, but we all know who deserves those flip-flops."
"When he passed through Cuba, the power went out, he crashed, and that's when we all fell," wrote a follower, perhaps offering the most clever—and most tragic—explanation of why so many Cubans feel they were born in the wrong place.
This type of satire —which turns everyday suffering into collective laughter— serves as both a release valve and a form of symbolic protest. Creators like Lina Hernández, who humorously tackled the simultaneous lack of water and electricity in a video that gained thousands of views, or the Cuban who ironically recounted 30 consecutive hours without power, have paved the way that @shantl now follows with her stork.
The comedian Mario Sardiñas ("Chequera") also recently released a reel satirizing blackouts as a "virus" called "quitaypón", joining a trend of survival humor that has become a constant presence on Cuban social media.
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