By Alejandra Garcia on November 28, 2024 from Havana
photo: Gilberto Ante Herrera
On November 14, 1965, the first doctors trained by the Revolution graduated in the Sierra Maestra Mountain. The unique academic promotion was accompanied by Fidel, who left an indelible mark on the new health professionals. Hector Terry Molinet, one of them, told the details of that experience to local newspapers and Resumen Lationamericano.
Photographer Gilberto Ante Herrera captured with his lens the first light of that day, in the vicinity of Pico Turquino, Santiago de Cuba, the highest point on the island of Cuba. It was at that moment where he found the perfect backlight: Fidel, on the right of the image, in profile, on a makeshift podium with his hands behind his back.
Around him, a dozen doctors and dentists, among the hundreds of young people who climbed, for five days, to the highest point of the island to receive their graduation diploma. It was the first promotion of health professionals after the triumph of the Revolution in 1959. In the photo everything looks quiet. The ceremony was about to begin.
Dr. Hector Terry Molinet, who was 28 years old at the time, remembers that morning vividly. “It was brutally cold on the esplanade of Pico Cuba -a few meters from the top of the Pico Turquino- where the graduation ceremony took place. But the enthusiasm was tremendous,” he told us.
THE BEGINNING OF A UNIQUE JOURNEY
The journey began at Havana’s Central Railway Station, from where the journey started. Halfway through the trip, a kind of electric current spread from train car to train car, recalled writer Ventura Carballido in his book Realidad de un sueño (Reality of a Dream). “Fidel was on the train with them. With his characteristic simplicity, he talked with doctors, professors, university students. He made everyone laugh, and gave them words of encouragement. He talked about the trip and was concerned about everyone’s mood,” Carballido recounted.
The doctors first arrived in Holguín and on November 8, they continued their trip towards Turquino, in a fleet of 21 Berliet trucks, with wooden benches and canvas roofs. That night they arrived at the school town that today belongs to the municipality of Bartolome Maso, Granma province. Then, they made their way to Las Mercedes, “a small town where I had been for a few months, after I was sent to that area of Granma in my last year as a student. This is when I joined the huge caravan along with my wife,” Dr. Terry recalled.
After years of study, interrupted by the closing of the University of Havana and the struggle of the insurrection, Terry was able to fulfill his dream of becoming a doctor. Dr. Terry began studying medicine at the age of 18, in 1955. One year later, after the uprising in Santiago de Cuba on November 30, 1956, as part of the actions to receive the Granma yacht, the dictator Fulgencio Batista decided to close the university and the hundreds of medical students were left in the street. Before the triumph of the Revolution, I was only able to examine three subjects.”
PROMOTION IN FIVE DAYS
With the triumph of January 1, 1959, many of us sought the possibility of returning to study medicine, Terry went on.
“And thus that huge group of students was created, which in 1965, received the title of university graduate in the vicinity of the Turquino Peak, after five days of climbing. Fidel’s company during the journey, and his signature stamped on the diploma, were worth the sacrifice of the hike,” he says and points with his finger to the traces of the signature in the center of the document hanging on the wall of his small studio.
We were a huge group, almost 500 young people, because leaders of the University Student Federation (FEU) and mass organizations, such as the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) and students from other faculties also joined the climb. “The ascent became an act of great political transcendence,” he says.
“We made stops at five points along the way. After Las Mercedes, where I joined, we arrived at Altos de Mompie, where Fidel Castro was appointed Secretary General of the 26th of July Movement and Commander in Chief of all the revolutionary forces in 1958. Then, up the Sierra, we arrived at La Plata, where Fidel established his command in 1958. We went from there to the village of Palma Mocha, followed by the community of Aguada de Joaquín and, finally, Pico Turquino”.
MEMORIES OF THE CLIMB
The tired faces among the hundreds of young people were common, due to the low temperatures, the rain that is usually abundant in the mountainous areas, the mud, the nights of sleep in hammocks, and the loss, at times, of the traced path. The women, with their hair tied with scarves and hats or caps, showed a careless appearance. Everyone was clamoring to get to the Turquino. “However, we never lost our enthusiasm,” Terry says.
It was a unique opportunity to be close to Fidel, that kept his spirit active, “although it was not easy to see him among so many people, he was always at the front of the huge caravan, together with Celia Sánchez Manduley, Jesús Orta Ruiz (the Indio Nabori poet) and other personalities, such as the Doctor Honoris Causa in Biological Sciences, José Millar Barruecos (Chomi)”.
But he was very close to everyone. “He did target practice every step of the way, passed among the groups, told stories, laughed with everyone…. It was a very friendly environment, we never felt like there was any estrangement.”
And this is how Gilberto Ante Herrera portrayed him, seated among some twenty boys, with an affable face and, there was Celia, always very close to him.
“On graduation day, Celia Sanchez, who was always a woman of many ideas and tenderness, had a group of hairdressers, with their devices, go up in Revolutionary Air Force helicopters from Santiago de Cuba to fix the girls’ hair and get them ready for the great moment of receiving their degree,” he said with a laugh.
Celia also set up a stand with ice cream of different flavors in the heart of the Sierra, which were also flown in by helicopter. “There were also barbers, shoeshine boys, stands with candy and fruit,” he recalled.
On graduation day, technicians and workers from the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television, with the help of the peasants, the Serrano Companies, the army and the Party made possible, for the first time in history, a radio, and television broadcast. “The work was very hard,” Terry recalls.
THE GRADUATES
We were tired from the long days of walking, but nothing prevented the ceremony from being beautiful. “The most emotional part of that morning was the moment when the parents of the martyr Pedro Borras Astorga, killed on the sands of Playa Giron during the U.S. mercenary invasion in April 1961 by the Bay of Pigs, received, from the hands of Fidel, the university degree of the son whose dream of graduating as a doctor was snatched away from him.”
It was a historic graduation, and from it we are left with the words of Fidel that morning, on the highest peak of Cuba: “Some go downhill on the road of life, without principles, and others go uphill. The important thing is that those who march uphill are not only more, but much better people than those who go downhill”.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – US