His dedicated life in the service of the teaching profession is an example for the new generations of Cuban teachers, the head of government pointed out on the social network X.

At the age of 18, Benitez was part of the first contingent of volunteers to teach reading and writing to children and adult farmers in the context of the campaign.

In 1961, members of one of the terrorist gangs backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to subvert the process of socio-economic transformation in Cuba, captured, tortured and murdered Conrado Benitez and his student, the farmer and militiaman Heliodoro Erineo Rodriguez.

That crime generated indignation among the population and mobilized about 100,000 young students, who, from that moment on joined the ‘Conrado Benitez’ Brigades and became the fundamental force of that educational feat, which concluded in December of that year with the teaching of almost one million illiterate people to read and write.

The terrorist gangs were definitively defeated in 1965, after six years of confrontation between the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Ministry of the Interior, and the National Revolutionary Militias (integrated by the population), in the revolutionary offensive known as Fight Against Bandits.

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