A man with a belly 144 centimeters in circumference was the winner, last Thursday, of a fat contest in celebration of Father’s Day in Nicaragua. The peculiar award has caught the attention of Cubans, who in recent years have seen their relatives lose weight due to the crisis while the belly of senior leaders grows every day as shown by the images published in the official press.
Ricardo Páiz, 60, is the proud Nicaraguan who swept the belly competition in the “Papá Panzón” contest, but if the contest were held on the island, it is very likely that his first places would fall to some other Party team Communist, the administrator of a state entity or the Provincial Governors, many of them with overweight problems.
Although the excess of kilograms is generally associated with poor nutrition, in Cuba having a high position carries the “privilege” of being able to binge eat, while the majority of the population deals with the difficulties of finding something to put on the plate . The trend towards athletic and sporting politics seems not to have reached the island, where the ruler Miguel Díaz-Canel himself has experienced a notable weight gain since he became president.
That volume, which they often try to cover up with girdles that squeeze the bellies but are noticeable in front of the cameras, wide shirts, baggy jackets and filtering the angle of the official photos, generates discomfort among Cubans who see in the obesity of the leaders a clear indicator of the abundance of their tables. References, nicknames and criticism for so many extra pounds are constantly heard on the streets of the Island.
“The fat necks”, “the first belly of the Republic”, “the paunchy”, “the paunchy” and many other nicknames have been added to the glossary of popular ridicule against ministers and partisan cadres. This, despite the fact that in Cuba there is a high prevalence of overweight, with 59%, while obesity already reaches 25%, according to FAO data. But, the current crisis could be taking some of those “lifelines” around the abdomen.
Between 1990 and 1995, the most difficult years of the Special Period, the Cuban population lost an average of 5.5 kilograms of weight, according to a study published in 2014 by the British Medical Journal. The data on the current crisis are still unknown, but most of those interviewed by this newspaper say that both they and their relatives now “are thinner and eat less” than five years ago.
But while the collarbones protrude in some, the bellies grow in others. Manuel Marrero, the Cuban Prime Minister, shows one of the most obvious pictures of obesity and his attempts to hide his belly in public are no longer of any use. “He was lucky that they removed the mandatory mask because he was going to need a sheet to cover his face,” says María, a 65-year-old from Havana who has lost seven kilograms in three years.
The governor of Camagüey, Yoseily Góngora López, is another of the most extreme cases of overweight among Cuban officials. In August 2022, the activist of the Patriotic Union of Cuba, José Luis Acosta Cortellón, was arrested and accused of threatening Góngora on social networks for publishing a meme in which he alluded to his obesity.
“As soon as someone is given an important position, they gain weight immediately,” complains Antonio, a retiree from La Lisa, who clarifies that “it is not a matter of fatphobia or believing that everyone with a few extra pounds is corrupt, but all that amount of weight that is seen in the leaders when they go out in public is immoral”.
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