Mario Eusebio Mestril Vega

Mario Eusebio Mestril Vega was a Cuban Roman Catholic bishop who became the first ordinary of the Diocese of Ciego de Ávila and guided that young local church for more than two decades. Born in Nuevitas, in what is now the Archdiocese of Camagüey, on 6 March 1940, he discovered a vocation early and entered seminary formation as a teenager. According to the diocese he later led, he began at the Seminary of San Basilio Magno at El Cobre on 3 September 1953, continued at El Buen Pastor in Havana, and in 1961 was sent to the Seminary of Saint Paul in Ottawa, Canada, for further study. That path from a coastal Camagüey town through Cuba's major seminaries and a Canadian house of formation shaped a priest who would spend nearly his entire public life in the island's center.

He was ordained a priest on 4 August 1964 in the parish church of Nuevitas by Bishop Adolfo Rodríguez Herrera. For years he served in Camagüey diocesan ministry and as chancellor of that diocese, learning the administrative and pastoral work of a Church that operated under tight civic limits. On 3 July 1980 he was assigned, with two other priests, to the Parish of San Eugenio de la Palma in Ciego de Ávila. That parish church would later become the cathedral of a new diocese, and the city would become his lasting home.

Pope John Paul II named him titular bishop of Cediae and auxiliary bishop of Camagüey on 16 November 1991. He received episcopal consecration on 9 February 1992 in San Eugenio de la Palma, with Bishop Adolfo Rodríguez Herrera as principal consecrator and Archbishop Faustino Sainz Muñoz and Archbishop Pedro Meurice as co-consecrators. His episcopal motto was drawn from Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want" (El Señor es mi pastor, nada me falta). The coat of arms he chose later, preserved by the diocese, placed Greek Christological letters and sheep above waves recalling the sea at Nuevitas, with a crozier crowning the Good Shepherd theme.

When John Paul II erected the Diocese of Ciego de Ávila on 2 February 1996, Mestril Vega was named its first bishop. He took possession on 28 April 1996. Over the next twenty-one years he built canonical structures from scratch, welcomed missionary priests and religious from Colombia, Spain, Poland and elsewhere, opened a diocesan library in 1997, restored public processions after decades of interruption, consecrated the cathedral altar for a jubilee anniversary in 2006, created a diocesan house in 2014, and late in his tenure erected new parishes in communities such as Violeta, Gaspar and Pina. A landmark public moment came on 7 September 1999, when he presided over a procession with the image of Our Lady of Charity through the streets of Ciego de Ávila, described by the diocese as the first such public procession in the province since 1960.

He lived through the landmark 1998 visit of John Paul II to Cuba, a turning point in Church-State relations on the island, and later the pastoral presence of Pope Francis's 2015 visit. In a September 2015 radio address preserved as "Nuestra Raíz," he told listeners that peoples, like trees, cannot live without roots, that Cuban Christian memory and devotion to Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre belong to the nation's identity, and that love of neighbor must include friend and enemy alike. Catholic-Hierarchy records show that he was a principal co-consecrator for Juan de la Caridad García Rodríguez in 1997 (later cardinal archbishop of Havana) and the principal consecrator of Juan Gabriel Díaz Ruiz, his successor in Ciego de Ávila, on 30 September 2017.

He resigned the see for age on 8 July 2017 and remained bishop emeritus, living in Ciego de Ávila. The diocese marked his silver episcopal jubilee that February with the apostolic nuncio and fellow bishops present. In late September 2026 the diocesan chancellor, Rev. Randol Pineda Muñoz, warned that his health had deteriorated rapidly and asked priests, religious and lay faithful for prayers, again recalling Psalm 23. L'Osservatore Romano reported that he died in Cuba on Thursday 1 October 2026, aged 86, and that his funeral was celebrated the next day in the diocesan cathedral. The medical cause of death was not made public.

Colleagues and the Cuban Church remembered him as a founding pastor who spent almost his whole adult life in the center of the island: first as a Camagüey priest, then as the shepherd who gave institutional shape to Ciego de Ávila's Catholic community under difficult conditions for religious practice. His arms and motto kept the Good Shepherd image at the center of his self-understanding: Christ as beginning and end, light against darkness, and the sea of Nuevitas as a sign of home. English Wikipedia's Deaths in October 2026 list records him among the day's notable dead, citing the Vatican newspaper's notice.