Life
Roberto Goizueta was born into a prominent family in Havana, Cuba. He was the only son of Críspulo and Aída Goizueta. His grandparents on both sides of his family had emigrated from the Spanish Basque Country to Cuba in the late 19th century. His mother's father, Marcelo Cantera, owned a profitable portion of a local sugar mill. His father, Crispulo, was an architect and a real estate investor who inherited Cantera's sugar interests.
In Havana, Goizueta attended Colegio de Belén, a Jesuit secondary school and later studied for a year in the United States at the Cheshire Academy, a preparatory school in Connecticut. At Cheshire, Goizueta bettered his English skills by watching American movies.
He began studies at Yale University in 1948, earning a Bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering. In 1953, he returned to Cuba to work in his family's business.
Fidel Castro rose to power in Cuba, transforming the island into a communist state. While on vacation in Miami, Goizueta and his family decided to defect to the United States. At the time of their defection, they had $40 and 100 shares of Coca-Cola stock.
His son Roberto S. Goizueta is a prominent Catholic theologian who is currently the Margaret O'Brien Flatley Professor of Catholic Theology at Boston College.
A heavy smoker, Goizueta died of causes related to lung cancer.
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“Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others—first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one’s own interests and desires. Carried to its “perfection,” it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.”
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“I suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a young soul to which they are totally unfit. Cannot we let people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way? You are trying to make that man another you. One’s enough.”
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