International News

HAVANA, (APP/AFP) – Inside Armando Yera’s
gym, toned Cubans in tight spandex are pumping iron in front of mirrored walls and pedaling furiously on stationary bikes, a scene that looks more Miami than Havana.
Yera is one of Cuba’s first competitive bodybuilders and part of its
budding class of entrepreneurs. Both activities were long frowned on by the
communist regime but are slowly gaining space on a changing island.
Visitors to Yera’s two-story establishment, Mandy’s Gym, in central
Havana, are greeted by a brightly colored sign that says: “This will increase your opportunity to be a success.”
In the entryway, there are before-and-after photos of clients whose
sagging bodies Yera has helped turn into chiseled statues.
Those changes are just about as gradual, painstaking and yet
transformative as the ones taking place in Cuba itself, as the island opens up to the world.
The bodybuilding craze started to grow after President Raul Castro
launched tentative free-market reforms when he took over in 2008.
Last year he reestablished Cuba’s diplomatic relations with its old
Cold War enemy, the United States — a bodybuilding haven.
Sian Chiong, a 21-year-old pop singer, is a regular at Mandy’s Gym,
and gives it credit for his success with the teenage girls who swoon for him and his boy band, Angeles.
Musicians in today’s Cuba have to please a public that “has become a
consumer of image as well as music,” said the muscular, immaculately coiffed
young star.
It’s a thought that could make Che Guevara turn over in his grave.
The late revolutionary dreamed of a Cuba of “new men” who would toss
aside individualism and materialistic cares to be selfless communist citizens.
The regime disdained the image-conscious culture of places like
Yera’s gym, which it derided as “bourgeois.”