Commander Manuel "Piti" Fajardo, the surgeon in green fatigues

History often teaches painful and precise lessons. It can prove that you may die when you are barely 30 years old and yet live on if you are Manuel “Piti” Fajardo, a Commander of the Rebel Army, and a doctor who knew how to excel in his profession while fighting bravely for freedom, before and after the triumph of the Revolution.

The doctor in olive green fatigues, as an inspired girl called him, has a place alongside many other very young Cuban patriots who were cut down in their prime for the same reasons and became an inspiration to us.

Nicknamed “Piti” by his mother and friends, the charismatic Manuel was born in eastern Cuba on November 8, 1930 and fell in combat in the Escambray Mountains on November 29, 1960 during the fight against domestic mercenaries paid and armed to the teeth by the United States.

From his mother Francisca Rivero Arocha, the first black woman to graduate as a Doctor in Cuba, “Piti” learned the perseverance, honesty and values that people need to uphold in a discriminating society that gave no opportunities to the humble.

“Piti” became a doctor himself in 1955 and, eventually, joined the clandestine 26th of July Movement. As a doctor and surgeon, he took care of the wounded secretly brought to his office from the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where the Rebel Army had been born on December 2, 1956, without accepting any pay from those who could not afford medical care.

On March 24, 1958 he went to the mountains to join the rebels, and his courage in combat earned him the rank of captain. Commander of the Revolution Juan Almeida Bosque said of him: "He was a fighter with a scalpel in one hand and a rifle in the other".

By the time the Revolution achieved victory, and already with the rank of Commander, he became director of hospitals in eastern Cuba until Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro tasked him with the construction of the Camilo Cienfuegos School City in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra Mountains, where the first 500 students, known as Camilitos, started their first course on July 26, 1960.

Today, when Cuba brims with schools, hospitals, clinics, polyclinics, agricultural cooperatives, industrial units, sports fields and other facilities named after him, we think of the humble and brave young doctor "Piti" Fajardo, who was also honored by the National Union of Health Workers, whose highest distinction bears Manuel’s name.

"Fajardo,” Fidel said, “fulfilled his duty in the war as a doctor and a soldier as he did in peacetime, which earned him a place in the hearts of the first 500 children of the Camilo Cienfuegos School City. ‘Piti’ will always be remembered as what he was: a doctor, a teacher, a soldier, and revolutionary who lived according to his profession and his political ideas.”