What is one of your go-to stories, one you like telling over and over?
A story I have told many times during the years concerns my cousin, Dr. Emilio Villamil Rodríguez who, after graduating as a physician at the University of Havana and being a preferred disciple of his anatomy professor, the genial Dr. Juan B. Khouri and being offered by the famous Dr. Antonio Vázquez-Pausa the opportunity to join his successful Havana practice, --Dr. Vázquez-Pausa's wife and Aurora Gómez, the wife of our uncle Manolo Rodríguez were sisters-- Emilito, as we called him, decided to forego all of that and go to the city of Pinar del Río instead, to practice medicine there, in a modest office and hospital, going to the most remote rural locations to attend the sick.
I witnessed cases at his office when poor farmers came to visit offering farm gifts in liew of money and before they left Emilito would ask them if they had money for the medicines and upon a negative response, he would pull out his wallet and give them the necessary money.
Emilito was very popular in Pinar, while you were with him, you could not pay at any local bar or restaurant. Back to the story, I witnessed, while with him at Bar de Pachín, locally known as "Papayal de Pachín because he had five daughters, while a "Curandero" or faith healer, a likeable man who had the ability to extract pertinent symtoms from the sick who came to consult in search of healing of some sickness, related the symtoms in detail to Emilito, who then made a diagnostic and prescribed the needed medicines. After the faith healer left, Emilito told me that the man would then buy the medicines himself, included them in some type of potion he prepared and gave to his clients as a miracle cure, with specific instructions of how often and for how long to take the remedy.
Another story I always enjoy telling also involves Emilito and his brother Pepe, who was like my second father. Pepe was a lawyer, his sister and my godmother Elena was his secretary at his office at Calle O'Reilly 315, in the old, colonial section of Havana and she took me often to the office.
After being well established as a lawyer, Pepe returned to the University of Havana and studied journalism, profession in which he also attained great success as one of the columnists of the very popular and with big circulation political satire weekly called Zig-Zag.
After graduating as a journalist and before writing for Zig-Zag, trying to help Emilito who, after creating a health camp in Pinar, with the help of Dr. Khouri, that they called "Campo de Salud" dedicated to healthy eating and excersise while being close to nature, decided to publish a weekly newspaper in Pinar, which they called "La Codorniz" or The Quail. I was still in high school then, so Pepe would pick me up each Friday afternoon and we drove to Pinar, staying always at the house of the finca "La Flor del Carmen" where my father was born, which was then empty and had a black caretaker named Felipe, who was very old and said he had been a slave, although that was doubtful, but certainly could and would eat anything and everything, as I soon learned, as Felipe prepared our meals, including anything he could catch in the river Guamá, including eels.
Very early on Saturday mornings we went to the humble office of La Codorniz, where Emilito, Pepe and I wrote and proof read the newspaper based on information Emilito had gathered for us, we did the typesetting and ran the small press to print hundreds and eventually a few thousand copies. On Sundays we went aroung delivering bundles of the free newspaper to different establishments in the city, before Pepe and I returned to Havana on Sunday evenings.
Other than those, there are many stories of trips we have taken, as we were lucky enough to travel to most of Western Europe, the Holy Land, a good portion of Latin America and of the United States.
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