Felipe, the Cuban farmer who grew a 21-pound sweet potato in the yard of his home in Sibanicú, Camagüey, became an unexpected star of social media this week.
He narrated in a video posted on Facebook how he achieved such a harvest from a tiny cutting that a neighbor gifted him.
"Well, kid, this was the neighbor from the corner, who gave me a tiny sweet potato, and I took the seed, planted it, and it started to grow," Felipe recounted in front of the camera. According to his own words, the sweet potato took about six to seven months to reach that size.
The video, shared by the Cuban musician and content creator Wilder el Supremo, received over 2,800 reactions and a hundred comments that blended admiration, humor, and a bit of technical skepticism.
Among the most celebrated reactions, one ironically summed up the island's food situation: "In Cuba, people gain weight more underground." Another, in a more festive tone, remarked: "It needs 20 pounds to reach the Goddess's papaya."
The critical voice of supposed Cuban agricultural technicians was not absent. A commentator pointed out that sweet potatoes are usually harvested after four months, and leaving them in the ground longer causes them to grow, but at the expense of their nutritional properties. Even so, he expressed: "Excellent harvest, he planted the bulb correctly as it should be. My respects to the colleague."
The video also shows that Felipe had already planted another sweet potato crop in the same spot where he extracted the giant one, suggesting that the result is not a coincidence, but rather the result of agricultural methods, well-maintained soil, and persistence.
In March 2021, a Cuban harvested a sweet potato weighing 31 pounds in Holguín, measuring 98 centimeters in length, which remains the largest recorded in Cuban media.
In February 2022, farmers in Matanzas harvested giant sweet potatoes that ended up in state markets in the area.
Historically, sweet potato was one of the cheapest staples in the Cuban diet. In 2026, with the inflation affecting the country, its price in the informal market hovers around 90 to 120 CUP per pound, according to reports from early this year in Havana.
In this context, each abundant harvest becomes news, a symbol, and a topic of conversation. In May 2026, researchers in Cienfuegos presented new sweet potato clones with yields exceeding 25 tons per hectare. Their impact on the tables of Cubans is not yet noticeable.
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