Meomartino men studied abroad; when Guillermo had elected to go to the Sorbonne, a year later Rafael became a freshman at Harvard. He roomed for four good years with a Portland, Maine, boy named George Hamilton Currier, a raw-boned baked beans heir whose family’s canned product was a staple in three out of ten American kitchen cupboards. Beany Currier gave him his first and only nickname—Rafe—and constant exposure to his views of the glories of medicine as a career. Guillermo had decided to study law at the University of California—it was traditional for Meomartino males to train for one of the professions even though their working lives were spent husbanding the family sugar interests—and when Rafe left Cambridge with second honors, almost as an afterthought he decided to study medicine in Cuba. His father had died of a stroke several years earlier. His mother’s world, which always had revolved about the warm glow of her husband, now maintained its stability through a similar orbit about her youngest child. She was a beautiful woman with a sweet but harried smile, an old-fashioned Cuban lady whose long slender hands tatted lace with easy skill, but a woman modern enough to collect abstract art and to go immediately to the family physician when finally she discovered the lump on her right breast. The terrible word was never spoken in her presence. The breast was removed with dispatch and kind words.

Rafe’s years in La Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de la Habana were good ones, the kind which do not enter a lifetime more than once, combined of youth and immortality and certainty in everything he believed. From the beginning the hospital smell was more heady to him than the sickening-sweet odor of sugar-cane bagasse. There was a girl, a classmate named Paula, small and dark and warm, with slightly buck teeth, with legs less than perfect but a behind like a pear and an apartment near the university and absolute clinical dependability in the matter of birth control. She glowered and lost interest at the mention of Batista, so he learned not to mention Batista, hardly a problem. There were times when he arrived at her apartment to find a small group, never more than half a dozen fast-talking men and women who fell strangely silent when he entered the room, in which case he would immediately and cheerfully depart.