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........

© Mother Jones