Missy, who is 43, has lived her whole life in the same house in San Miguel del Padrón, a borough of eastern Havana, but “many generations have left the country.”
Cuba faced an inflationary spiral at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which triggered an economic crisis that has been compounded by a more recent US oil blockade, triggering rolling blackouts and mass transport cuts across the country.
The US “wants to suffocate us”, says Missy’s 73-year-old mother. “If they don’t target you for food, they target you for fuel.”
In recent years, some of Missy’s neighbours have turned to “quimico” to escape their harsh reality in Havana. Use of the cheap and highly addictive synthetic drug has become increasingly common despite the Cuban government’s long-standing policy of zero tolerance for drugs.
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“You don’t have to be young to be a drug addict,” says Missy, who is using her nickname due to concerns regarding authorities in the US where she hopes to emigrate.
“There are families like mine who have three children and don’t have a plate of food right now, either because they don’t work or because their salary isn’t enough.”
In the “worst-case scenario”, she says, someone comes along and tells a parent not to stress and “to take something so you can relax” – and that’s how they start using quimico. The drug-taking in San Miguel de Padrón is largely fuelled by social escapism rather than gangs, says Missy.
Drug debt is uncommon – “no one will sell you anything if you don’t have the money to pay”. Meanwhile, the few gang members in nearby neighbourhoods who had access to guns – which remain a rarity in Cuba – emigrated once they earned enough money, says Missy, who studied engineering and runs a small business.
She hopes to emigrate with her three children and join her husband in the United States.
At the end of 2021, Missy’s husband travelled to visit a cousin in New Jersey. As a dual Cuban-Spanish citizen, he travelled under the US visa waiver programme available to Spanish citizens.
But after the Trump administration included Cuba on a US list of state sponsors of terrorism in January 2021, it had become increasingly difficult for anyone with dual Cuban citizenship to rely on the visa waiver and they were eventually barred from the programme in 2023.
“He was lucky that they let him into the United States,” says Missy. Not long after her husband arrived in New Jersey in December 2021, Missy found herself pregnant unexpectedly with her youngest daughter.
She called her husband and told him to stay in the US.
“I told him: You have nothing here. You used to tell me in Cuba you’re a real fighter; now prove it to me,” she says.
Her husband spent nearly a year in the US without papers before applying for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, enacted in 1966 for Cubans fleeing the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro.
The act currently provides a pathway to permanent residency limited to Cuban citizens who have lived in the US for a year. This condition has become increasingly difficult to satisfy as the Trump administration curtails legal avenues open to Cubans to enter the US and deports migrants without legal status from the US.
Missy is in the process of applying for Spanish citizenship while she waits another two years for her husband to complete the five-year residency period that would allow him to petition for his family to join him in the US, where he works in a factory – “he’s all alone there.”
Since regularising his status in the US, Missy’s husband has been able to travel to Cuba for short periods to see his family and met his youngest daughter when she was 11 months.
“We’ve been together for 19 years,” says Missy. “I can enjoy him for 21 days, or 18 days when he is able to come home. Separating couples takes its toll. God willing, my husband won’t call me and say it’s over because of the distance ... It’s a psychological war.”
Missy is worried about leaving her parents, who are retired and who she lives with in Havana.
“I know I’m going to go to help them,” she says. “But I know it’s going to take a while, and only time will tell if I’ll ever see them again.”
“I tell her that if her husband is there [in the US] and her children are there, it’s wonderful for them to live with their parents,” says Missy’s mother, sitting on a sofa opposite her. “That is the family you created, the others [like me] are family, but that was the one you created.”
Missy’s family practises Santería, an Afro-Cuban religion based on Yoruba culture. Speaking to the dead is a central focus of the faith, which was brought by Africans from modern-day Nigeria and Benin to Cuba, which served as a slave colony until 1886.
Today, adherents to Santería often practise it alongside their Catholic faith in Cuba.
In Missy’s livingroom, is a shrine with handcrafted spirit dolls dedicated to Mama Francisca, a powerful figure in Santería culture.
“My daughter buys flowers for her,” says Missy’s mother. “I make her coffee.” If Missy receives permission to travel to the US, her mother says that she will perform a ceremony to see whether the Mama Francesca doll that has been in her family for more than 50 years wishes to stay with her in San Miguel de Padrón or accompany her daughter as she starts a new life in the US.
