Felicidad Iglesias had been with Roberto Durán for fifty-two years when she took a call from a Panamanian news crew on 17 March 2024 and explained why her husband was going into surgery the next morning. She had sent him for a routine test. It found a fault in his heart.
“Roberto isn’t seriously, seriously ill,” she told TVN Noticias. “I had a routine test done on him, something came up here in his heart and he needs a pacemaker. They’re operating tomorrow and he’ll be out in two days.”
Durán was 72. The problem was a complete atrioventricular block, a failure in the electrical signal that sets the heart’s rhythm. Surgeons fitted the pacemaker in Panama City the following day, and CNN en Español reported that the operation was successful.
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A schoolgirl from the better side of town
Panama knows her as La Fula, local slang for a fair-haired woman. Formally she is Felicidad Iglesias de Durán.
She grew up in Panama City and went to secondary school there. Her husband, the fighter Panama calls Manos de Piedra, came up in Chorrillo, left school after first grade and shined shoes to help feed his mother, who cleaned houses in the old Canal Zone. They met in the Caledonia district, where he lived above a row of shops and used to watch her walk home past them.
Her parents objected to the relationship. In Christian Giudice’s biography of the fighter, Hands of Stone, Durán’s trainer Nestor “Plomo” Quiñones describes how hard they pushed back. She moved into Durán’s flat in Caledonia anyway in 1972. Their first son, Chavo, arrived later that year, and the wedding came afterwards. Plenty of Panamanian couples of that generation lived as husband and wife for years before making it formal.
Her date of birth has not been published. Durán has posted birthday messages to her on 24 February, and a Washington Post profile from June 1980 gave her age that summer as 25, which points to February 1955. That would make her 71.
Felicidad Iglesias taught her husband to read
Durán could not read or write, having left school too early to learn, and picked it up as a grown man. That same Washington Post profile credits his wife with teaching him. He was a world champion by then.
Inside the camp and the business
Giudice’s book has her working in promotions, running with Durán in the mornings and going into the gym herself to check what condition he was in. “My presence encourages him during the tedious ambience of his rigorous training,” she told a reporter in the late 1970s.
After the “No Más” surrender to Sugar Ray Leonard in November 1980, Durán fell apart. He admitted later that he had been drinking, going out and letting himself go. She saw him come back when the Pipino Cuevas fight was signed for January 1983.
“From that point on, I began to see the same Roberto as before, happy, joyful, the one that liked to joke around. I recovered him. He was back. He was the same Roberto I once knew.”
She spoke for the household when rumours started about the money. By May 1985 people in Panama were saying the family was closer to broke than rich. She went on Radio Mía that summer and said they had sold what they wanted to sell, that it was their right and their private business, and that their finances were secure enough to provide for the children.
The biography lists those children by the names the family uses: four sons, Chavo, Robbie, Branbi and Fulo, and three daughters, Irichelle, Jovanna and Dalia, plus an adopted son. Dalia was born to another woman. Chavo and Irichelle both boxed professionally for a short time.
How Hands of Stone portrayed her
Ana de Armas played her in the 2016 biopic, in scenes where the character smokes and drinks her way through her husband’s collapse. Durán objected in public.
“There are scenes when she is smoking and drinking and she doesn’t do either, she never has,” he told the Guardian that August.
Jonathan Jakubowicz, who wrote and directed the film, defended the choice in the same interview. The film examines her story as well as her husband’s, he argued, particularly the months after New Orleans when she was living with a man who would not leave the house. The cigarettes and the drink were there to show the distance and the depressed state she was in.
She is in the film herself. The credits list Felicidad Iglesias de Durán as the midwife who delivers her own character’s babies.
The July she spent in intensive care
Durán tested positive for COVID-19 in late June 2020, days after his 69th birthday, and spent about a week in hospital.
In early July, the Panamanian journalist Álvaro Alvarado reported that Iglesias had been admitted to intensive care at the Hospital Nacional with the virus. She was there for just over two weeks. One of her sons posted a photograph when she came home.
Fifty-four years in
Roberto Durán’s wife has given few interviews in half a century, and she has no Wikipedia page. What is on record comes mostly from her husband’s biography, that 1980 newspaper profile and the morning in 2024 when she explained his heart surgery on television.
Durán turned 75 in Toronto in June. He has spent 2026 driving between gyms in Chiriquí and Herrera, running open trials to pick twenty amateurs for a Panamanian squad he wants to put in against a Mexican team organised by the Márquez family.
Thirty-five years into the marriage, Durán told a reporter:
“To be married to Roberto Durán for thirty-five years is not possible. She is a saint.”
Nineteen years on, they are still married.
