If Ruben Alvero moves easily between worlds, it may be because he’s had a lot of practice. He’s a Harvard-educated doctor who’s the son of a factory worker; a professor in reproductive endocrinology whose work takes him into the mystical world of folk healers; and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve who as a baby was spirited from Miami to Cuba by his exultant parents at the news of the Cuban revolution.

“My parents were basically Cuban revolutionaries,” Alvero explains. Fed up with the Batista regime, they fled to Florida in the late 1950s. Alvero, their first child, was born in Miami in 1958. As Castro seized power, the family returned to Cuba to enjoy the fruits of the revolution. “It wasn’t long before they realized things there were crazy,” says Alvero. Getting back to the States wasn’t easy, but Alvero played a decisive role. By virtue of his American citizenship, he served as a living passport of sorts for his family to get back across the Florida Strait.
The family settled into the Washington Heights area of Upper Manhattan, where Alvero’s father got a job working in an industrial diamond factory. Alvero was an eighth-grader at the Monsignor William R. Kelly School when the principal, Brother Brian, approached him and described a place called Phillips Academy. An application, an acceptance and a scholarship soon followed.

“My first reaction to Andover was that I’d never seen so much asphalt-free turf in my life,” says Alvero. “I had the time of my life there.” The boy who came to Andover from Cuba via Washington Heights became a cluster president, spent a trimester in Mexico in the Man and Society course and threw himself into PA’s survival program, Search and Rescue. The experience provided him with a love of the outdoors that still drives him today.

Two years after graduating from Harvard, which was, he says, “a little bit of a letdown after PA,” Alvero entered the F. Edward Hebert School of Medical Science, the medical school for the U.S.
armed services. He met his future wife, Karen Koski, in basic training, and they set out together for what turned into 15 years of active duty as Army doctors. Karen specialized in neuro-ophthalmology, while Alvero became an OB-GYN and fertility specialist. The Alvero-Koski family has two daughters, 13 and 10, and a 7-year-old son.

Now retired from active military duty, Alvero and his family have lived outside Denver, Colo., since 2001. He is busy as an associate professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, but he’s found time to get involved in several area nonprofits. “In the Army, we moved around a lot,” he explains. “Now we have settled into a community.” Alvero is the medical adviser to a local organization called Hepatitis-C Connection that works in the Mexican-American community to stop the spread of blood-borne diseases. Central to the group’s work is influencing curanderas, folk healers to whom the immigrant population turns for medical help.

“The Mexican population is suspicious of modern medicine because it’s intimidating and unaffordable,” Alvero explains. “They turn to the curanderas. Our work is to persuade the curanderas to suggest the lifestyle changes that control the spread of Hepatitis-C, HIV-AIDS and other diseases.”

Alvero also volunteers as a mentor in a collaboration between the local Harvard Club and Gear-Up, a nonprofit that works to encourage Latino students in the Aurora, Colo., public schools to develop the aspiration and skills to attend college. Ruben’s beat is West Middle School, where he’s one of the few mentors fluent in Spanish. “It’s important to start the kids and their families thinking about college when they’re in the sixth grade,” Ruben says. “It’s kind of one person at a time.” Ruben knows what that’s all about. Thirty years ago, that person was he.

—Alan Cantor ’76

Alan Cantor is vice president of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund and class secretary for the Class of 1976.