November 26, 1945 �" May 8, 2012
A celebration of the life of Arturo DeRobles will be held Saturday, September 15 at 1 p.m. at Plymouth United Church of Christ, 424 Monte Vista Avenue (at Oakland Avenue) in Oakland (limited parking is available in the rear via a driveway off of Monte Vista).
Mr. DeRobles, born November 26, 1945 in Las Tunas, Cuba, died in Miami, Florida on May 8, 2012. He led a life of adventure, with, as he himself put it, "sensibilities toward the good."
He left Cuba at the age of 15 during the Cuban Communist Revolution as part of the Peter Pan program devised by the Catholic Church and the Central Intelligence Agency to bring to the U.S., children from Cuba whose parents were not able to leave the country. He leaves an extended family still in Cuba.
Raised in the hills of Tennessee by a foster family, Arturo found his way to California. He became a teacher in a Catholic high school, where he taught liberation theology and took students to visit the homeless. He moved to San Francisco at the height of the 1960s revolution and became a medical laboratory technologist with specialty in cytopathology. This led to a move to Hawaii, where he ran cancer screening services in the 1970s. He moved between Hawaii and San Francisco, building his career in health administration. He took a Master's in Public Administration from the University of San Francisco in 2008, the same year he finally became a U.S. citizen.
Arturo never lost his love of learning, or his desire for spiritual awareness. He enrolled in the Austin (Texas) Presbyterian Seminary in 2005, but dropped out when it became apparent the church was not accepting of his inclusion of the LGBT community in worship. In 2010 he successfully completed the Master's in Divinity program at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, and moved to Miami to complete his ordination requirements in the United Church of Christ.
His last days were spent ministering to hospice patients, particularly the Cuban American community.
Arturo made friends wherever he went and he will be sorely missed. Again, in his own words he "acknowledges our human inherent nature toward the 'good,'" and his role as a guide for spiritual action in the world.