Cavs Spanish Announcer Goes on Touching Family Trek to Top of Mount Kilimanjaro

The summit of Mount Kilimanjaro is close. The tallest free-standing mountain in the world juts from the Tanzanian savannah. Six days into the climb, a group of 28, including 24 guides, porters and cooks, has battled altitude sickness and fatigue. All have sweated and frozen on the trek through a rainforest and an arctic zone. They now face Uhuru Peak, Africa’s tallest at 19,340 feet above sea level, and must set out before midnight to conquer it.

An unforgettable sunrise above the clouds awaits — if they can make it.

Four men carefully begin their summit, the darkness pierced only by stars, satellites and hikers’ headlamps. 

Benji Moreira is at least 25 years younger than his three uncles, including Rafa Hernandez-Brito, the Spanish voice of the Cleveland Cavaliers. With the temperature below zero, Moreira fears he is going to lose two toes because his sweat-soaked socks and liners have encased his feet in ice. But he is also struck by the excitement of the feat he is about to accomplish. He can’t hold back the intense, conflicting emotions as he wills himself to push forward.

“I started to cry a little bit,” Moreira says. “My tears, as soon as they started to fall, they just froze on my face.”

Hernandez-Brito didn’t dream of climbing Mount Kilimanjaro. The bilingual announcer, who also works games for the Guardians and Browns, is dedicated to his career. Known as Rafa “El Alcalde,” or “The Mayor,” Hernandez-Brito is the first to call each of the three major American sports in Spanish, as well as the NCAA Men’s Final Four. His high-energy play-by-play has defined the Cavs’ Spanish broadcast for 10 seasons. He made the pivot to his “American dream” after working for Coors Brewing Co. as a mechanical engineer. 

An avid cyclist? Yes. Adventurous? Yes. But a mountain climber? Hernandez-Brito wasn’t so sure. 

“I always had the desire to do it, but there’s always the doubt in your head, ‘What if your body, the altitude, if one can’t do it, we all have to go down?’” he says. 

The challenge was on the bucket list of his brother Carlos Hernandez, 62, who recently retired after 37 years at JPMorgan Chase. Hernandez’s wife and two friends had originally planned to join him, but his wife couldn’t climb due to a detached retina. That prompted calls to brothers Hernandez-Brito, 56, Benjamin Hernandez, 58, and Moreira, 31, the son of their sister Ana. 

All were eager replacements, even though Hernandez-Brito had only three weeks’ notice. More than just a grand adventure, the September trip marked the first time since 1980, when Carlos Hernandez was the first of the siblings to leave war-torn El Salvador for the United States, that the brothers had been together for anything other than family events. 

Ahead of the climb, Hernandez-Brito and Moreira enjoyed a three-day African safari before they were joined by the other two. After a three-hour drive to the park entrance on Sept. 18, they started at the Lemosho gate, 2,500 feet high.

All thought they were ready to scale Kilimanjaro. Benjamin Hernandez, service manager for the Americas for shipping giant Maersk, is based in Sacramento, California, and has climbed Mount Shasta (3,586 feet). Carlos Hernandez, who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, trained in Aspen, Colorado (8,000 feet). Hernandez-Brito was biking the Col du Tourmalet, a Tour de France hill in the French Pyrenees, when this opportunity arose. Moreira, a technology program manager in Dallas, says he wasn’t physically challenged over the first few days.

Wakeups were at 6 a.m., with climbs typically starting at 7 a.m., when the sun was not so strong and lasting no later than 3 p.m. The crew went to bed at 8:30 p.m., challenging for a night owl like Hernandez-Brito. After a day and a half in the forest surrounded by monkeys and flowers, the terrain became rocky, more strenuous and colder by the hour. Using poles for the last few days, Hernandez-Brito found himself putting his feet where the guide had stepped.

Spectacular views were part of the trade-off.

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One night they slept above those cotton candy clouds, gazing at a sky one can only see in the most remote locations. 

“You can see the satellites move,” Hernandez-Brito says. “The stars look so big they all look like planets.”

Hernandez says the sight was like being in a plane as it breaks through the clouds. Mount Kilimanjaro proved to be everything he’d expected.

“It was amazing to be above the clouds,” Hernandez-Brito says. “I think that’s something that everybody should experience because it’s unreal. It’s very humbling to see. I’d never done anything like it.” 

The downtime brought to life stories about the brothers Moreira had heard as a child when he visited Uncle Rafa in upstate New York.

“I saw them interacting in a way that was very much in line with how they were growing up. They were always hanging out together, teasing each other, always like a little gang,” Moreira says. “It was really sweet to see that.”

But the journey tested their resolve.

One woman stopped in fear in the steep, narrow paths of the Barranco Wall, causing a long backup. On their way down, they learned that someone in a group ahead had died. They saw members of a Spanish group descending with oxygen masks and on stretchers: one-wheeled contraptions pushed by running porters. Some groups had to be helicoptered out. 

It’s estimated that 65% of people reach the Kilimanjaro summit. Most who fail are stricken with altitude sickness.

In an attempt to acclimate and avoid that, Hernandez-Brito and his group often climbed 2,000 to 3,000 feet higher than needed each day, then came back down to sleep.

“It was challenging mentally to me. A couple of times I was like, What the hell am I doing here?” Hernandez-Brito says. “But it was great. I don’t think I was in any danger of quitting or my life, but it was hard. I think anybody can do it, but I don’t think it’s for everybody. Nine days, sleeping in a tent in the cold, not eating well, a shower was a bucket of hot water. Physically it’s challenging, but the altitude more than the walking.”

The darkness borders on exhilarating during the final climb to the summit, which starts at 11:30 p.m. Moreira sees little dots, headlamps of groups in front of them. He looks back and spies perhaps 200 more dots. Encouraging words emerge from the blackness.

“It’s totally dark, but you have so many people around you that are kind of like cheering you on,” Moreira says. “If we passed a group, everyone would say, ‘Keep going. Keep going.’ It was kind of a nice little community of people for that night.”

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“It was amazing to be there and see the world, but it was cold as hell,” Hernandez-Brito says. “I took the gloves off to take pictures and my fingers were frozen instantly. But I had to take my picture with the Cavs flag. We’re big about representing our colors and our family.”

Their arrival at the summit was not a coincidence, Hernandez-Brito believes, since 555 is a lucky number for him and his wife, Lily Martin.

“For some reason, I looked at my watch and thought, ‘I was meant to be here,’” he says. “We always think it’s a good sign; whenever we see the clock and it’s 5:55 we text each other. We summited at 5:55 a.m. on my grandmother’s birthday, and that wasn’t planned.”

Hernandez tried to capture the emotions of the feat.

“It was physically, mentally, emotionally invigorating, energizing,” Hernandez says. “We did a video interview, a guy was filming us, ‘How do you feel?’ I think Rafa said, ‘Oh my God, I think I saw God a few times, but I feel great.’”

The breathtaking scene and the sense of accomplishment touched them all. 

“The best was the bonding experience with my brothers, being back like we were teenagers,” says Hernandez-Brito.

Now Hernandez-Brito is such a convert that he wants to tackle Mount Everest base camp in Nepal, generally a 14-day climb to 17,598 feet. Hernandez and Moreira might join him.

“Sunrise is coming, the sun is above the clouds, it’s so beautiful,” Hernandez says. “You see that in the video, people got emotional, including Rafa. I’m sure everybody had in the back of their minds, ‘Can I do it?’ We all did it. You’ve been laboring the whole time. By that time, it’s so cold all you want to do is to get to a bed and take a nice hot shower.”

The four know they prevailed with the help of the Swahili word that was their guide’s mantra. They carried it with them, even after the day and a half it took to get down.

“The guide would always say ‘Pole, pole,’ that means slow, step by step,” Hernandez-Brito says. “They would say, ‘Don’t worry about it, the summit will come. Just worry about today.’ In the mountains, everything is pole, pole.”