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Dailier Rodríguez Tamayo, a 19-year-old from the municipality of 1ro de Enero in Ciego de Ávila, died on March 16 inside military unit 10-24, located in El Cotorro, Havana, where he was completing his Mandatory Military Service (SMO).
According to the testimony of his mother, Yaimy Tamayo León, the young man received a firearm that very morning and shot himself, despite explicit medical warnings indicating that he should not possess weapons or be subjected to stress, reported on Facebook by the blogger Obdiel Torres Guevara.
The military authorities initially reported the incident as an "accident," a version that the family categorically rejects. Yaimy asserts that a doctor from the Naval Hospital had indicated, after detecting psychological disturbances in the recruit, that her son should not carry weapons or face extreme pressure situations.
The mother claims to have contacted the commanding officer directly, identified as Lieutenant Colonel Mulé, to inform him of those medical directives. Initially, Dailier was assigned to unarmed self-service and guards, but that measure was not maintained and the medical mandate was ignored.
Within the unit, the young man reportedly experienced a progressive decline: exhausting physical workdays, lunches outside of scheduled times, lack of rest, and exposure to chlorine, which caused skin injuries, despite his known and certified allergic condition.
"There were days when he would tell me, 'Mom, I didn't eat, I preferred to sleep a little,'" Yaimy recounted. In the early hours of March 16th, Dailier tried to call his mother, but she couldn't answer due to a lack of electricity and connection.
"I know that if I had talked to him, my son would not have taken his own life," declared the mother in a post shared on social media this Monday.
After the death, the family is denouncing a complete institutional opacity: they have not received a medical report, autopsy results, medical history, or any information regarding ongoing investigations.
The case of Dailier is part of an alarming pattern of deaths in the Mandatory Military Service. According to the organization Cubalex, at least 18 or 19 young people died during Mandatory Military Service in Cuba throughout 2025, approximately two per month. Among the most notable cases is that of Antonio Alejandro Ressi Roque, 18 years old, who passed away on August 18, 2025, at unit 5050 of Calvario in Havana.
Her mother, Mercedes Roque, has been demanding answers for seven months without receiving any. "It's a fixed carpet where everyone is covering for each other, where blame never falls on those who are truly responsible," she lamented.
Also in August 2025, Lázaro Daniel Monteros, 19 years old and also from Ciego de Ávila, died in the unit of El Morro in Havana, amid contradictory reports and without official communication. In December of the same year, Endis Leyva Nieves passed away due to injuries sustained during a military exercise at Combinado del Este.
The immediate context of Dailier's case is equally tense. Last Sunday, a military recruitment office was burned down in Contramaestre, Santiago de Cuba, while the MINFAR launched a promotional campaign with belligerent rhetoric that generated widespread backlash among the population.
Mercedes Roque, whose fight for justice has become a reference for other families, made a direct call: "No more mandatory military service in Cuba, mothers, take a stand, march, do not send your children to mandatory military service."
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