 An ambitious human resource training program allowed him to obtain a scholarship and attend first the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1958, and then the University of California at Los Angeles where he received the master's degree in Marine biology in 1960.In 1961, with the support of the doctor Luis Manuel Peñalver, founding rector of Universidad de Oriente, he began studies of ichthyology at the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, where he obtained a PhD degree in 1963 for the doctoral thesis entitled ""Ionic regulation in Austropotamobius pallipes (Lereboullet)