Editor’s note: This article ran in the Aug. 22, 1969, issue.
FORT CARSON, Colo. — The sum of $1,000 “and a few goats,” according to Maj. Jaime Edelstein, pediatrician at Fort Carson’s hospital, “meant the difference between my becoming a doctor or ending up in Castro’s medical militia.” What the major did not include in his matter-of-fact statement were his increasing devotion toward his profession and his wife’s plucky determination to help him reach his goal.
Edelstein and his wife, Eugenia, grew up in Cuba. When he was halfway through the required six years of medical school, however, a stumbling block appeared. It was an official summons to report to a medical school used as a wellspring for the medical militia. If he failed to report, his name would appear on a list barring him from further study and he would be denied the right to become a doctor. The only alternative was to leave Cuba.
Both Edelstein and his wife were endowed by birthright with a belief in freedom. Born of Jewish parents who emigrated from Europe to Cuba before World War II, they were well versed in the extremes of governmental control.
“We were young,” he said, “but we knew what had happened to each and every relative during the war.”
His brother, a former instructor at the University of Havana, had left the country a few days before, headed for a post at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio. The logical move would have been for the young couple to join him there. But Eugenia Edelstein didn’t have a U.S. visa, and since the American embassy was no longer in operation in Cuba, she was unable to get one.
Because of the Jewish extraction, however, an Israeli visa was open to her. They left Cuba in 1961 immediately after the Bay of Pigs incident. The price: $1,000 each and a few goats.
“The Israeli government paid $1,000 for every Jewish person who wanted to leave Cuba at the time,” the major explained. “We were flown to Tel Aviv in a Cuban plane. Part of Castro’s bargain was that the plane would return to Cuba loaded with goats.”
When they stepped onto Israeli soil the major was 22, his wife was 17. Up to that point they had led relatively secure lives and neither had experienced the kind of physical, mental or emotional hardships that lay ahead.
They were destined for a Kibuts at Merhavia. In exchange for safe lodging and food they worked in the fields or at any of the manual jobs needed to keep the kibutz self-sustaining. Eugenia Edelstein took her turns in the kitchen washing the large cooking utensils. At the end of four months, they had learned enough Hebrew so that the major could enter Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem and his wife could get a job there.
Since no money could be taken out of Cuba, it was a matter of intense concern that Eugenia Edelstein be able to work. “That was the only way we had for me to finish medical school,” the doctor remarked. “In Jerusalem my wife worked in one of the banks as a bilingual secretary — English and Spanish. She was given just two months in which to learn to type in Hebrew.”
At the end of the major’s first year of study in Jerusalem, word came from a Cuban classmate that the Spanish government was offering financial assistance to students who fled communist countries. If the Edelsteins could get to Madrid, the young doctor-to-be could finish his medical training there with no sacrifice of credits. Tuition would be waived. They were, however, still obligated to the Israeli government. By selling everything they possessed, they managed to repay all the government had put out in their behalf.
In November 1963 the doctor and his wife finally arrived at their ultimate destination — the United States. Through an unusual quirk of fate, he was accepted for an early internship and later a pediatric residency in the Cleveland hospitals. He went on to further training and experience at the University of New Mexico, Metropolitan General Hospital and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Last year the Army beckoned. Waiting for an October commission, Edelstein “filled his time” by work in the Cleveland ghettos with the Office of Economic Opportunity.
