Meet the Team
Giraldo Alayón García Memorial
September 2026
On Thursday, September 24, 2026, Cuba lost one of its most accomplished natural scientists. Those of us who had the privilege of knowing him lost a caring friend.
Dr. Giraldo Alayón García, 79, served as Curator of Invertebrate Biology at Cuba's National Museum of Natural History from 1988 until his death, and as President of the Cuban Zoological Society from 1995 to 2001. He was known to be among the preeminent spider experts in the West Indies. His interests and expertise were broad in scope: in addition to arachnology and entomology, Giraldo's expertise included ornithology and mammalogy. In the field he could deftly lecture on a range of topics including evolutionary biology, always on point and never to excess.
Between 1989 and 1993, Giraldo participated in six official expeditions in Cuba in search of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and he is considered by a select group of researchers to have made the last credible sighting of the bird in Cuba. For more than 35 years he was a valued professor at the University of Havana, inspiring generations of students. With his wife, Aime, he founded and managed the Ariguanabo Foundation in his hometown of San Antonio de los Banos. His numerous scientific and academic publications and achievements have been lauded by colleagues with better access to such records than I. For additional information, please use the following links:
Giraldo was a good friend to me personally and to the friends of the Caribbean Conservation Trust. My mission here is to celebrate him not only for his professional accomplishments and talent, but also to introduce him to you as a person of warmth, charisma, and humor, and of deep dedication to the conservation and preservation of the natural world, especially Cuba's incredible natural resources. For all his learning, Giraldo carried his expertise lightly and was always generous in educating others. He was affectionately and respectfully known to colleagues and friends as "Spider Man," a moniker that describes both his profession and his superhero-level generosity of spirit.
For more than 30 years, Giraldo and I shared a professional relationship through my work in Cuba as Founder and Director of the Caribbean Conservation Trust. He was one of our most diversely talented Field Leaders, and I had the privilege and pleasure of co-leading numerous trips with him. His serious academic credentials and demeanor were always tempered by sincere humility, personal charisma, and a refined sense of humor.
At the time of this writing, relations between the United States and Cuba are at their most discouraging point in those 30 years. There were moments, however, during the Clinton and Obama Administrations, when citizen diplomacy filled a void that the two governments have long struggled to navigate. When opportunity allowed, Giraldo sought invitations to conduct research at institutions in the United States, including the Smithsonian, the American Museum of Natural History, the Peabody Museums at Yale and Harvard, the Field Museum, the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and, most recently, the University of Vermont in 2015.
On more than one occasion, my family and I hosted Giraldo in our homes in New Haven and Litchfield County, Connecticut. Before we met in Cuba in the mid-1990s, Giraldo had spent considerable time in northwest Connecticut as a guest of John McNeely, a mutual friend and a principal in two of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker expeditions in which Giraldo took part. We later joked that we may have crossed paths in Litchfield County in the early 1990s without realizing it. As we spent more time together, we discovered other things in common. Giraldo loved 1970s American music, a by-product of Radio Marti, our government's Cold War effort to bring news and entertainment to Cubans fortunate enough to catch its signal from Miami. He was an avid sports fan, always well informed about our major league teams, and, like me, an aging athlete with similar aches and pains, both of us having played second base for our respective universities.
One of our fondest memories is of a Halloween night in New Haven. While my wife, brother, sister-in-law, and I walked our four costumed children around the neighborhood, Giraldo single-handedly manned our front porch, fake webs, cheap plastic spiders, and all. He endured the two-hour assignment with his usual broad smile, helped along by a 1970s rock station and some Two Roads beer.
While we were leading a group together in eastern Cuba in 2018, Giraldo shared the story of his first visit to the region, as a young graduate student on a major expedition in 1974. Within a week, the expedition made an unexpected discovery: a small, rare, shrew-like animal known locally as the Almiqú, the Cuban solenodon (Atopogale cubana), was captured alive. This was newsworthy because, after decades of apparent disappearance, the Almiqú had been declared extinct in 1970.
As the youngest and least experienced scientist on the expedition, Giraldo was tasked with escorting the animal to Havana. From the trail in the Guantanamo hills the two were hustled overland on slow, jarring roads, arriving at the airport in Holguín after dark, and from there boarded an aging Cubana Airlines Tupolev 154 for the two-and-a-half-hour flight. Despite the Almiqú's musky, goat-like scent and venomous bite, Giraldo's telling conjured the image of a service animal seated beside its loving owner. Having flown enough on vintage Soviet aircraft in Cuba, I can appreciate such a companion. Comfort may have been too much to expect from the Almiqú, but it surely provided some distraction from the hazards of a 1974 Cubana flight over Cuba's highest mountain range.
By the time Giraldo reached Havana, the museum staff had long since left for the night, so he and the Almiqú set off for his home in San Antonio de los Baños, about an hour southwest of the city. To his exhausted surprise, they were welcomed by a large local crowd and a television news crew. He and his new friend had made the national news! At this point in the story, a member of our group quipped that this was the equivalent of Crocodile Dundee capturing a Tasmanian Tiger. From then on, at least for the remainder of that trip, Spider Man became "Soleno-Dundee," much to his delight.
Giraldo clearly appreciated the value of self-deprecating humor. Amid all his serious, lifelong scientific and academic achievements, he treasured the irony of his role in an accidental scientific miracle.
After all, what else might we expect from the Spider Man?
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