Longtime South Side physician was classmate of Fidel Castro

[Jimmy2]

By Larry Finley, Sun-Times News Group

Antonio Carballo and Fidel Castro were once young classmates in Cuba.

That was long before Dr. Carballo became a successful Chicago physician and Castro overthrew the government of the island nation and became its ruler.

"My father thought Castro was a very intelligent student," said Dr. Carballo's son, Antonio. "But he didn't like his political beliefs later, and my father came to the United States for more opportunity."

Dr. Carballo found his opportunity at Mercy Hospital on the South Side, where he was a physician and teacher for nearly 40 years. He died Wednesday of heart problems at 80.

"He died at Mercy Hospital, where he started his career and ended his life," his son said. "All of his kids were born there. He had a great love for Mercy."

He was co-founder of the Alcoholism Treatment Unit at the hospital in 1972 and was the first director of its Health Care and Rehabilitation Center, formerly in Homewood.

One of his students, and later a colleague at Mercy, was Dr. Terry Mason, Chicago's health commissioner.

"I had a chance to see him a week or so ago," Mason said. "He was a gentleman, a scholar and a wonderfully warm human being who loved his patients. He taught us what it meant to be a caring and compassionate physician."

Dr. Carballo was born in Havana on Sept. 9, 1927. His father was a tailor and his mother a seamstress.

"He went to Jesuit schools where a lot of the teachers were Americans," his son said. "This was where he got his interest in coming to America."

The school that he and Castro attended, Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, was moved to Miami after Castro, its most famous alumnus, took power.

After graduating from the University of Havana Medical School in 1953, Dr. Carballo left for the U.S. Castro's takeover of Cuba was still more than five years away, but his leftist revolutionary movement had started.

"My father knew there was a change in the political order coming and that Cuba was not the place to be," his son said.

Dr. Carballo did an internship at Memorial Hospital in Worcester, Mass., then a residency at St. Francis Hospital in Evanston and at Mercy Hospital. After a fellowship at the National Heart Institute and Loyola University's Stritch School of Medicine, he practiced with the Vaughn Medical Group in Bridgeport for five years before establishing his own practice in the Mount Greenwood community.

He joined Mercy Hospital in 1961, according to Sister Sheila Lyne, Mercy's president.

"There were a few other of our doctors who came from Cuba at that time," she said. "They took some extra tests to get into the U.S. medical system, and they became dedicated to the profession."

Dr. Carballo specialized in internal medicine and taught some of the young doctors at Mercy as well as teaching at Stritch and the University of Illinois. In 1972, he and the late Sister Lorita Quinn started Mercy's alcohol-treatment unit.

"He was a very friendly outgoing man who loved practicing medicine and Mercy Hospital. He had very broad interests and could talk about subjects other than medicine, which was nice," Lyne said.

Dr. Carballo's survivors include his wife, Suzanne; two other sons, William and Thomas; three daughters, Mary Jo Sanchez, Patricia Carballo and Teresa Peterson; and 14 grandchildren.