Carmelo Laborit (Story)

Rio Caribe, the area of the Carib Indians' river, a Sugarcane enclave in the Paria peninsula, was the area where I think I was born again. Well, yes, I was born a marabout, a doctor by profession from which I had just graduated, in faithful compliance with my mother and my people, I was honored to be appointed to comply with Article 8 of the law of professional practice as a rural resident doctor of the Pedro Figallo, a small hospital in that town.

It was a period of beautiful and crucial teachings through living, experiences that would mark my life, in a strange and distant land. I lived in the town where I was a doctor, I was consulted by friends and neighbors, in other words, they were the people with whom I shared my life on a daily basis. Its peaceful atmosphere, bucolic tranquility that squeaked in the ears, its people, rather its good manners, its sport. Its cultural manifestations among which was the bagpipe group "Los Nivaldinos" of which I was part together with Checha, Manuelito, Categorio, Adelcris, among others. I even got appendicitis and was operated on in the same hospital, so they played a joke on me that my love for Rio Caribe was "for having left my belly in the village".

How could I forget the staff in those Decembers when we made the birth (I called it a manger) and sang to it together with the worshippers, among them the Morochos Cabello (I once joked and named them in the Hojilla that Mario and his guest Bianco looked like these), establishing a tradition. Many memories of that period of 1986-87, as already expressed in another article of how I met Che Guevara with the surgeon of the hospital, an Argentine named Gonzalez who was a fellow student of this eminent revolutionary.

I always tell my brother Aarón Montiel the story that one day I was on duty, when a robust bearded man with a poised voice came in through the auxiliary door leading to the hospital's internal corridor asking permission to talk to me. The man told me that he lived in Caracas and was from Rio Caribe. He had been called in because his mother, who still lived in this town, had fallen ill and we had hospitalized her. I wanted to explain the case to him.

I introduce myself to him and in response he tells me that his name is Carmelo Laborit. I immediately asked him if he was related to the founder of the Socialist League and he replied that he was. A nervous laugh broke out in me, when I was going to believe that this opportunity would present itself to me to have someone I admired without knowing him. -I see her," I explained. I thought about taking him out for a chat. I explained to him his mother's illness and told him that he could not yet take her to Caracas for treatment in the capital's hospitals, we would have to stabilize her. It was an excellent opportunity to ask him many questions, issues that overwhelmed the student who had just graduated a few months ago and who was facing a reality that confused him.

The conversation was interrupted by the need for emergency consultation, and was resumed at every moment. I asked him how he had resisted being a socialist after so many years and extreme episodes. He answered that tenacity and commitment, above the muzzle of arepas and family obligation. I asked him, among other things, why some comrades at the university on the left were "champions" of the right when they graduated, to which he told me that they deceived us, they were by our side out of emotion, snobbery, for whatever reason, but when they went out and had the advantages of privilege, their true personality and ideology emerged and developed. The important thing was the commitment to the people, -which if you feel it, he told me, you have no choice but to continue exercising it.

It was really minutes that seemed like hours of conversation which nourished me and filled me with strength, regaining hope. His mother was properly stabilized and his discharge from Dr. Pedro Figallo Hospital was authorized. They arranged their belongings and comrade Laborit went to say goodbye to me, eternal gratitude for those moments. When he broke his hand he said goodbye, a born Riocaribero to an adopted one.