Mi Vickicito

March 30, 2026·19 min·1 clip

Julia's grandmother uses Vicks Vaporub as hair conditioner and toenail fungus cure, hinting at a deeper story tied to Cuba.

Host Julia Longoria announces this is her goodbye as a co-host of Unexplainable and shares one of the first radio stories she ever made, originally produced with Kenny Malone for WNYC's Only Human. She introduces her 80-year-old grandmother as a sharp, irreverent Cuban immigrant who designs dresses and reads novels in English. She describes her grandmother's obsession with Vicks Vaporub, the pet name Vickycito, the multiple jars on her vanity, and the lingering Vicks smell in the bathroom. In a phone call, the grandmother runs through escalating off-label uses: on the chest for coughs, on sore knees, on toenail fungus, on fingernails to strengthen them, and even as a pre-shampoo hair conditioner. Longoria learns that much of this tracks back to her grandmother's life in Cuba. Her grandmother mentions the Bay of Pigs almost offhandedly, which surprises Longoria because her grandmother has rarely spoken about life before emigration in 1967. Longoria describes her own college thesis on Cuban bloggers and her first trip to Cuba, and frames this story as a rare chance to open a conversation. She recaps the 1961 US-backed invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro, the failure of the mission, and the capture of about 1,100 fighters who were held in Cuban prisons. She explains the 1962 prisoner ransom, paid in roughly 50 million dollars of food and medical supplies including Listerine, aspirin, surgical equipment, and, as best she can determine, a large quantity of Vicks Vaporub. Months later, her grandmother visits New York and sits in a WNYC studio for the first in-person interview about her past. She describes growing up near Varadero in a pink bedroom, meeting Longoria's grandfather at the beach, and the day-to-day scarcity after the revolution, with empty groceries and long pharmacy lines. She explains that Vicks filled in for hand cream and nail hardener because Cuban soap was harsh and imported products had vanished. Despite those hardships, she associates the smell with feeling better when sick. Longoria ends with her own memory of waking up at her grandmother's house to off-tune singing of Las Mananitas and recognises that Vicks transports her grandmother back to her own pink childhood bedroom, then steps out of the studio while her grandmother quietly smells the jar.

As heard by us

Vic's vapor rub opens a restrained family story about memory, Cuba, and a conversation still waiting to happen.

Vic's vapor rub becomes a way into family memory, and the piece works best when it stays with that pressure: the speaker wants to ask about a grandmother and Cuba, but does not yet know how. That uncertainty gives the story its shape.

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Why you'd press play

A family story that starts with vapor rub and opens into a Cuba conversation.

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