Che’s daughter confirmed for Latin America 2025!
Campaign News | Sunday, 24 November 2024
Aleida Guevara, daughter of the Argentinian-Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, will be the headline speaker at Latin America 2025 on 8 February.
Aleida is a doctor of medicine and director of the Che Guevara Studies Centre, Havana – a Cuban institution that keeps the personal archives of her father, and promotes his life, work and thought. She has also worked as a paediatrician in Angola, Ecuador and Nicaragua, and is author of the 2006 book Chávez, Venezuela and the New Latin America.
The Cuba Solidarity Campaign has organised five previous tours for the UK for Aleida, in 2004, 2009, and 2014, and also as headline speaker at the Latin America Conference in 2012 and 2017.
Writing ahead of her last visit in 2017 she said: “Do I have hope for humanity? None of us has a crystal ball, but if we want a different world, we need to work to achieve it. We can’t wait for it to fall out of the sky. We have a duty to forge that future ourselves.”
Aleida on the NHS
She is passionate about the need to protect the NHS which was the inspiration for Cuba’s own world-renowned service, established after the Revolution. Speaking at a meeting during her 2017 UK tour, she said:
“Public health is a human right because you must not exploit human suffering as a commercial activity. Once you had perhaps the best health service in the world – now it’s being privatised in gigantic leaps. So, what are you going to do about it? Because if these victories came from years of struggle by workers, how is it possible for you to permit those things to be lost?”
She urged the audience to “be strong and defend what you have against rampant privatisation.”
Aleida on Solidarity
In an article for the US magazine Jacobin in 2022 she talked about why international solidarity is central to Cuban socialism. col 1 para 1 line 1 insert health before service
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Solidarity is one of the most beautiful things about the Cuban people.
“All Cubans have had their own experience with solidarity. Some as teachers, some as doctors, others as instructors. For example, we have all had some type of experience on internationalist missions. And even if one has not been on a mission personally, there is always a family member who has.
“From an economic point of view, offering free medical training meant economic sacrifice for the Cuban people, but it’s truly a beautiful thing, and it makes one feel very proud to be Cuban.
“We feel proud to have worked in so many different parts of the world, always carrying our message of solidarity while at the same time learning more about the need for love, understanding, and respect among us all.
“If those things don’t exist, we can’t change this world. And we do need to change this world, because we just can’t go on living like this.”
Aleida on Palestine
The Cuban doctor has been outspoken on the liberation of Palestine for many years and is an ambassador of the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine (GCRP). Speaking at a GCRP conference in 2023 she said:
“It hurts me that we are still in the process of returning to Palestine, when we should have been today at the stage of talking about development projects for the people who have returned to Palestine. We demand a return to Palestine, because the world seems deaf and blind to the crimes of the Zionists. The Palestinian people need us all to be by their side, so we will continue to struggle and fight until liberation.”
In March 2024, while attending a meeting of world leaders for peace in Chile, she recalled her father’s first visit to Gaza in 1959 during the earliest months of the Revolution, and only eleven years after the Nakba, when over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland. She told Prensa Latina that “the blockade against Gaza must be broken, food and medicine must be allowed in, it is essential to learn that the Palestinian people should not continue to suffer from hunger and disease.”
Latin America Conference 2025
Saturday 8 February
10am–5pm
Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London WC1H 9BD
Nearest tubes: Kings Cross/Euston
TICKETS: £10 waged / £8 unwaged in advance (£12 / £10 on the door)
Book and pay online at bit.ly/LA25ticket
For full details & conference updates:
latinamericaconference.co.uk
