?Did you consider any other careers? How did you choose?

When I graduated from high school, or "Bachillerato" as the secondary school was called in Cuba right after my sixteenth birthday in June of 1958, the University of Havana was closed due to political unrest, so I went to work at "La Selecta" instead, my father's furniture store that was run by his partner Manolo Sánchez. His son Manolito and I worked there in addition to Manolo.

I had just gotten my driver's license and loved to drive, Manolito did not drive, so I was mostly on the road doing errands, sometimes Manolito accompanied me to deliver some light furniture in the 1952 Mercury woody station wagon I drove.

At the beginning of 1959 Celia Sánchez came into the store, selected furniture for Fidel Castro in a house in Cojímar and for Ernesto Guevara for a house in Tarará they had taken over; she paid with $500 and $1,000 pesos as stated previously. That was the reason I met Ernesto Guevara when we delivered his furniture.

The university opened again in 1959 and I enrolled. I wanted to be a Mechanical Engineer, but the University of Havana did not offer that career, I would have had to go to Santiago de Cuba to study it, so I enrolled in Electrical Engineering instead, which was offered at the University of Havana.

Admission was no problem, it admitted anyone that had graduated from Bachillerato, thus the lack of incentive to get high grades. Tuition was $55 a year and if you stated you could not afford it, they waived. I paid it. The greater expense were the textbooks, so that poor people often studied sharing the text books of a friend that could afford to buy them.

I did finish my first year, barely approving the subjects, only got better grades in Calculus 1 and 2, Physics 1 and 2. When I arrived in Miami and tried to get a scholarship at the University of Miami, I was dumb enough to show, in addition to my diploma, the transcript of my grades. Needless to say, I was turned down.

After military service and returning to Miami, jobs were scarce; although I had received good training in air conditioning as well as elevator repair, at that time only union jobs were available and my reluctance to join a labor union kept me from them. A bad mistake.

An even worse mistake was to reject the offered help by Serafín Menocal, former President of the Cuban Electric Company, which was a subsidiary of American Foreign Power, a large public New York company. sSerafín had great contacts in New York, could have been a huge help. My mother-in-law Lolita had asked to help me and he agreed, but I did not want to move to New York, raise our children there. Perhaps if I had known him better at the time I would have gone, because later on he became one of my favorite people, I enjoyed very much listening to his anecdotes.

So it was that I entered the insurance business by chance, when Tom Taylor recruited me for Western and Southern Life Insurance Company. Worked there from 1965 to 1970, when I was recruited by Chuck Reynolds from The Travelers.

Beginning while working for Western and Southern and finished while working for The Travelers in 1973, I graduated from The American College of Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania, as a Certified Life Underwriter or CLU, a five year course, which had a deal with the University of Miami where I attended classes, but the diploma is from The American College.

In 1972 I left my management position at The Travelers and became a Travelers agent, open our first insurance office, Select Insurance, at 2060 E 4 Avenue, Hialeah, later on in 1980 opened a second office at 2562 SW 27 Avenue, Miami. Did business with other companies, eventually became general agent for Orion Insurance company, which later changed it name to Aries Insurance Company, under a new name, Business Insurance Consultants; eventually sold Select Insurance, struggled with BIC until finally succeeding in the late 1990s. The company bought us out in 1999.




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