OPINION English edition of José Luis Tan Estrada’s Spanish-language column, originally published March 12, 2026.
Aleida Guevara’s tears for children leave Cuba’s children out
Aleida Guevara, daughter of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a physician and a public defender of the Cuban communist regime, appeared in a HispanTV interview expressing grief for children in Iran and Palestine. It might be a moving image. But the problem is not that she mourns those children. It is the children whose suffering she leaves out.
Her appeals also leave unanswered the suffering of Ukrainian children under Russia’s war and the plight of children inside the political system she defends.
Aleida Guevara travels the world with her father’s name as a political calling card. She speaks at international forums against the crimes of “imperialism.” Yet her memory becomes remarkably selective when children suffer under the regime she represents and supports.
Some hypocrisy hurts more than silence. It is the kind dressed up as compassion.
Cubanos por el Mundo Live on Aleida Guevara’s remarks about Iranian children. Watch on YouTube.
In this column
Who is Aleida Guevara, Che Guevara’s daughter
Aleida Guevara March was born in 1960, the eldest of the four children Che Guevara had with his second wife, Aleida March. She trained as a pediatrician, specializing in childhood allergies, and has worked at the William Soler Children’s Hospital in Havana.
That background matters. A pediatrician who speaks abroad about children’s rights knows better than most what a preventable death means. Over the years she has also become one of the regime’s most visible ambassadors, traveling to Europe and beyond to defend the revolution her father helped build.
The 13 de Marzo tugboat: children the sea could not hide
On July 13, 1994, Cubans attempting to flee the island boarded the tugboat 13 de Marzo. State-operated vessels pursued it, directed high-pressure water jets at the passengers and rammed the boat. It sank.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights’ Report 47/96 records 41 deaths among the 72 people on board, ten of them minors. Thirty-one people survived. Survivors testified, and the Commission found Cuba responsible for violations of the victims’ rights to life and personal integrity. It also concluded that the state had failed to investigate what happened.
The crime was documented. Survivors told the world what had happened. Where, in the public compassion Aleida Guevara so readily displays abroad, is comparable attention to those Cuban children?
Where is the grief for the youngest passengers, for the siblings who never reached another shore?
The tugboat sinking is not an isolated chapter. It belongs to a longer pattern that Cubanos por el Mundo has documented in the record the Cuban regime must answer for.
Paloma and the parents who asked for justice
Cuba promotes its health system abroad as a model. Yet the family of Paloma alleged that medical negligence in that system caused their daughter’s death. A child. A life lost in the country whose health care the regime celebrates before the world.
Paloma Domínguez Caballero was one year old. She received the MMR vaccine on October 7, 2019, at a polyclinic in Alamar, in eastern Havana, and died two days later at the Borrás-Marfán Pediatric Hospital, according to OnCuba News. Four other children vaccinated at the same clinic also fell ill.
Days later, health officials ruled out the vaccine as the cause and attributed her death to “severe complications and a multi-organ dysfunction,” the Ministry of Public Health said. Her parents had called it medical negligence.
The parents’ account, cited in the original column, describes more than grief. They say their demands for justice were followed by persecution and exile. Those are allegations from the family, rather than a medical finding or an independently established judicial conclusion presented here.
Did Aleida Guevara use her international platform to demand answers for Paloma? Did she speak for parents who say they were punished for seeking justice? Those are the questions her selective public solidarity invites.
The girls beneath the balcony: Havana falls on its children
Video about Havana’s deadly building collapses. Watch on YouTube.
Havana is falling apart. That is not merely a metaphor. It is concrete, dust and lives cut short. Cuban girls have died beneath collapsing balconies in a city whose housing stock has endured decades of neglect.
One of those collapses happened on January 27, 2020. Part of a building gave way in the Jesús María neighborhood of Old Havana as three schoolgirls walked home from the Quintín Banderas school. María Karla Fuentes and Lisnavy Valdés Rodríguez, both 12, and Rocío García Nápoles, 11, were killed, OnCuba News reported, citing Cubadebate.
Meanwhile, officials enjoy privileges and the regime’s international defenders speak in comfortable conference halls. The contrast demands scrutiny.
Those girls do not occupy the center of Aleida Guevara’s international speeches about children’s rights. Their suffering is inconvenient precisely because it occurred in Cuba, under the system she defends.
View the post referenced in the original column on Instagram.
READ ALSO: Anger over a deadly balcony collapse turns toward Díaz-Canel and Raúl Castro.
Hypocrisy as a system
Solidarity that excludes suffering at home becomes propaganda rather than humanism.
Aleida Guevara has every right to mourn children anywhere in the world. But moral credibility requires confronting the suffering of children under the regime she supports, including cases that challenge its carefully marketed image.
Compassion that leaves out the children of the 13 de Marzo, Paloma, the girls crushed beneath Havana’s balconies and other young victims of Cuba’s failures is politically selective compassion.
When tears serve to defend a political system while its own victims remain invisible, they become political makeup.
Cubans who have buried their children and struggled to make their stories heard know the difference.
View the post referenced in the original column on Instagram.
