People line up at a grocery to receive humanitarian aid in Havana.Yamil Lage/AFP/Getty
My mother and her family left Cuba when she was 15 years old, four years after Fidel Castro’s revolution claimed their island home. They arrived in Union City, New Jersey, in 1963, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis between the US and the Soviet Union nearly spiraled into nuclear war. Like many Cubans during the early days of the Castro regime, her father, my grandfather Angel Roberto Mas, was convinced that the move would only be temporary. Within a few short years, he hoped his family—my grandmother, mother, and uncle—could return to their two-bedroom home in Fomento, a small town tucked in the rolling hills of central Cuba.
My grandfather never saw his homeland again. He died of a heart attack three years later—when he was 48 years old. I never met him, but I thought about him sixty years later when Fidel Castro died in 2016 at the age of 90. I was in Miami visiting home for Thanksgiving when news of his death broke, and Cubans flooded the city’s streets banging pots and pans to celebrate. As a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times at the time, I visited a cemetery on Calle Ocho, the heart of Miami’s Cuban community, and spoke to those who were visiting the graves of family members who had died before this historic moment.
For my whole life, I have witnessed how my family here has tried to help our relatives in Cuba. It’s the same ordeal for millions of others who left the island knowing it would fracture their families forever. In the 1960s, when my mother came to the US, they kept in touch via telegrams and letters. She went more than a decade without hearing her grandmother’s voice until international phone calls became more widely available. On my mother’s three trips to Cuba, she traveled with suitcases and duffel bags full of gifts and food for her cousins and aunts. And in the last few years, she’s relied on privately run shipping agencies, which advertise their services with the well-known phrase, Envíos A Cuba—or “shipping to Cuba”—to send care packages to them.
Fast forward to 2026, and the packages that Cuban exiled families and humanitarian aid groups send to the island have become more crucial than ever. The Caribbean nation is experiencing what Cuba scholars describe as the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce for many of the approximately 10 million residents—and even when it is available, it’s extremely expensive. Blackouts have plagued the island for years. Its once-prized medical infrastructure is deteriorating. Inflation is astronomical—the exchange rate in the informal market is currently above 500 Cuban pesos per US dollar, up from 40 pesos in 2021. The government no longer picks up the trash, so residents have resorted to burning garbage, leaving fumes of smoke cloaking the streets. Since the US invasion of Venezuela in January, Cuba is rapidly running out of oil now that Venezuela no longer sends shipments, and Trump has threatened other nations with tariffs if they intervene. “No modern economy can function without fuel,” Sebastian Arcos, interim director at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, told me last week. “The current crisis that we have is going to get worse.”
“No modern economy can function without fuel. The current crisis that we have is going to get worse.”
It already has. On Monday, Cuba’s entire electrical grid collapsed for more than 29 hours, and Cubans in the US with family on the island fret about what will happen to their loved ones. My mother, now a retired hair stylist and grandmother, has kept in touch with several cousins there through Facebook and WhatsApp. In one message, a cousin in Havana described how she waited 11 hours in line just to obtain a canister of fuel for cooking. In a voice note, another cousin described cancelled bus routes to nearby towns and power that only comes on in spurts, concluding that “everything is bad.”
Now my mother and millions of other Cuban immigrants—the community in Florida alone is more than 1 million, and it’s estimated another 2 million are scattered throughout the US—all await updates on the negotiations between the administration of President Donald Trump and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on the island’s future. On Monday, Díaz-Canel announced that Cubans abroad can invest in and open businesses.
My mother recently sent our family nearly $200 worth of medicines and hygiene products, including multi-vitamins, antibiotic ointment, body lotion, anti-bacterial soap, perfumes, toothpaste, and antacid tablets. “I wish I could send more,” she told me. Economic ties between the US and Cuba are restricted under the decades-old embargo, which began in 1962 under President John F. Kennedy following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The embargo severely limits commerce with the island. It does, however, allow for some exceptions for humanitarian aid and gift parcels. This carveout has resulted in the creation of privately run Cuban shipping agencies, where my mother goes to send care packages to her family.
I stopped by one in Tampa, called Miramar Services, last Friday to see if the business has changed, given all the increasing pressure facing residents of the island.
Located in a strip mall off busy Hillsborough Avenue, I walked into the office, soft piano music playing in the background, and greeted owner Lorein Castellanos Gomez. She sat behind a desk, a list of the packages she would be picking up at her clients’ homes in a few days in front of her. On one wall, shelves are stacked with powdered milk, espresso coffee, Vienna sausages, toothpaste, packets of drink mixes, guava paste, mayonnaise, crackers, and chips. Some clients, she explained, might add a last-minute item to their packages. On another wall, a shelf contains boxes of rice cookers, solar LED lights, and battery-powered fans—a popular, even essential purchase given the constant outages.
Castellanos has a rare window into the connection between Cuban immigrants and those they left behind. She and her husband opened Miramar Services—named after their neighborhood in Havana—three years ago. “People sit here and tell me their life stories,” she told me. She gets updates about clients’ loved ones: the cousin recovering from surgery, the baby that’s now a toddler, the mother back home who recently died. Packages can travel by airmail, on a plane that leaves once a week, or on a cargo ship. Recently, however, fuel shortages in Cuba have resulted in some delivery delays. Havana deliveries have remained relatively constant, but those going out to farther, more rural regions can take longer to arrive.
She remembered one recent customer who came in with a box of food. He had lived in the US for 10 years and never sent anything back home. It’s a common sentiment for many in the Cuban exile community; if you send aid, you’re indirectly supporting the regime. The man wasn’t sure he wanted to send the box. “Either way,” Castellanos recalled telling him, “we send, send, and send, and people are still struggling.” He handed her the package.
As I stood talking to Castellanos, Yuly Reyes and Mayra Gonzalez arrived carrying large garbage bags crammed with goods. Together, the three women started arranging the items into U-Haul boxes that Castellanos retrieved from the back of the store. “Let me tell you, this takes a lot of skill,” she told me, only half joking as she placed oatmeal packets into small crevices around boxes of Special K and pancake mixes. “They don’t have any breakfast over there,” Reyes explained. “They can make themselves some oatmeal, and at least that’s something.” Castellanos told them she recently sent a friend packets of instant mashed potatoes and tuna so she could cobble together lunches during blackouts.
They stuffed over-the-counter medicines, clothing, and a few pairs of sandals into the boxes as well. Reyes also packed plastic shopping bags from Ross and Burlington Coat Factory—her family can use those too. Each box was weighed, and Castellanos recorded its weight with a permanent marker. The total amount was 121 pounds worth of breakfasts, medicines, clothes, and other items bound for the island.
Outside the store, Gonzalez told me she has been in the United States for 10 years. I asked her if she’s ever returned to visit. “I have never gone back,” she said, her eyes immediately watering. “We do what we can,” Reyes chimed in. “We suffer because we can’t send packages all the time. Things are hard here, too.”
Clients also often send nonessential items, Castellanos said, such as furniture, clothing, and party decorations. When I was at the shop, someone dropped off a kitchen sink and turquoise-colored patio furniture cushions. Some clients have told her that they can’t fathom their loved ones lacking some of the products that they take for granted in the US. After years in the shipping business, Castellanos believes that simple creature comforts can distract from the crisis most Cubans endure every day. I thought of my mother’s cousin. Among her requests for medicine, she also asked for a new eyebrow pencil—hers had run out long ago. Any black or brown one, she wrote, would do.
