Francisco Durán García was born in Santiago de Cuba. He graduated in 1975 in Havana, at the so-called graduation of the First Party Congress, after studying at Victoria de Girón Institute of Basic and Preclinical Sciences and at Calixto García Hospital Medical Sciences Faculty. He completed the internship (last year) in the specialty of Psychiatry, and in full training he worked as such in the Army.
Then he did the social service in Camagüey and back to Santiago de Cuba, he took the course of Epidemiology, a branch of Medicine that allows more community actions, interventions in large populations.
He directed the Aedes Aegypti eradication campaign and the AIDS Prevention and Control Program, both in Santiago de Cuba. Just on the day he was being examined to receive the specialty title, he was handed responsibility for the Aedes Aegypti eradication campaign, in full strike of the 1981 dengue epidemic.
Then he headed the Vector Disinfection and Control department, and later, assumed the direction of the AIDS Prevention and Control Program. He also assumed the direction of the sanatorium in Santiago de Cuba for three years.
He was also Rector of the University of Medical Sciences of Santiago de Cuba. He served as vice minister of the Teaching and Research area of ??the Ministry of Public Health, later called Medical Teaching.
He traveled as chief of the Cuban medical brigade in Angola. For three years there, he had the unique opportunity to learn about diseases eradicated and eliminated in Cuba, but which he had read or heard in his studies on epidemiology.
Durán was later, back to Havana, first deputy director of the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine (IPK), an institution of national, regional and international reference, and from which he later left to assume the leadership of the Department of Communicable Diseases of the Ministry Public Health. He currently has six years as Epidemiology Director of the said Ministry.