"Fiñe", Spanish for kid, is the simple nickname that most people around him called this short big-hearted man who was born in Santiago de Cuba in 1958.
His father, Jorge, carried in his veins the eagerness for practicing sports. He devoted many years to form and give life to the popular sport fan club of Plaza de Marte in the city of Santiago de Cuba.
The kid arrived to weightlifting for good. Being 15 years of age, he felt attracted to this sport and less than a decade after that, he won a gold medal in the Olympic games of Moscow'80 (123 pounds) to become the first Latin-American champion in this sport.
He had arrived to the Russian capital after having obtained a sixth place in Montreal'76, but with the merit of his first world record in Germany'77.
By the way, during his prolific sport life he became the Cuban achieving the highest amount of records in a lifetime: nine world records, four Olympic, and eleven world records in the junior category.
No doubt, the International Weightlifting Federation included him in the Top Ten of that sport during the 1980's.
After his retirement from weightlifting, he has collaborated as a trainer in several countries. He also worked as a teacher at the Superior Institute of Physical Culture "Comandante Manuel Fajardo", in Havana until he assumed the direction of the technical staff of the Cuban national weightlifting team. With that typical modesty of his, he has said: "Yesterday, I was a bad student. That is why, today I try to be an average teacher."