Ramiro Valdés

Ramiro Valdés Menéndez was born on 28 April 1932 in the La Matilde neighbourhood of Artemisa, then in Pinar del Río Province. Spanish Wikipedia records that his parents' families came from Asturias, from Gijón and the Nalón valley. Speaking at his funeral, President Miguel Díaz-Canel described a childhood home with an earth floor and a cardboard roof, where, as Valdés recalled, it rained more inside than outside. His mother, Ofelia Menéndez, was described as a follower of José Martí and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes who taught him dignity and honesty.

As a young man he worked as an apprentice lineman for the electricity company, as a shop hand and as a helper on a sugar cane truck. Official accounts say he took part in protests by electrical workers. The 10 March 1952 coup by Fulgencio Batista found him hauling cane at a sugar mill, and he joined the circle of young men from Artemisa who followed Fidel Castro.

Valdés had little formal schooling, and no university degree has been reported. His political and military formation came through the 26th of July Movement, prison on the Isla de Pinos, training in Mexico before the Granma expedition and the guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra. In 1960 he travelled with a delegation led by Raúl Castro to Czechoslovakia, where, according to historians Jan Koura and Robert Anthony Waters, he received intelligence training.

On 26 July 1953, aged 21, Valdés joined the assault on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba. He was one of eight men chosen to take Post 3; Cuban accounts say he knocked down the chain blocking the gate and was the first inside, together with José Ponce and Jesús Montané, and was among the last to withdraw. He was wounded by a bullet that, according to Díaz-Canel, he later removed himself with a field knife in the Sierra Maestra.

Arrested days later, he was tried by the Urgency Court of Santiago de Cuba and sent to the National Prison on the Isla de Pinos. In February 1954 he was among the prisoners who sang the 26th of July March during a visit by Batista and was punished with fifteen days in an isolation cell. He was freed under the amnesty on 15 May 1955.

In Mexico he helped organise and train the expedition, and he was one of the 82 men aboard the Granma, which landed in eastern Cuba on 2 December 1956. After the surprise at Alegría de Pío he escaped with a small group that included Juan Almeida and Che Guevara, later joined by Camilo Cienfuegos, and reached the Sierra Maestra.

When the Rebel Army was reorganised in 1957 Valdés was given command of a squad in Raúl Castro's platoon. He later served in Column 4 and, when Che Guevara formed the invading Column No. 8 "Ciro Redondo", he was named its second-in-command. He took part in the march from east to west, the actions in the Escambray and the capture of Santa Clara, and reached 1 January 1959 with the rank of comandante. Cuban official sources describe him as one of three historic leaders who took part in all three decisive episodes of the revolution: Moncada, the Granma landing and the westward invasion. Raúl Castro later said Valdés had "the merit and the honor" of being second-in-command of the column Che led to Las Villas.

After 1959 Valdés was second chief of La Cabaña fortress, military chief of the central region and head of the state security organs, the G2, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. In October 1959 he took custody of the arrested commander Huber Matos and transferred him to Havana. When the Ministry of the Interior was founded on 6 June 1961 he became its first minister, serving until 1968. He was a founding member of the Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba in October 1965.

He was later First Deputy Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and an aide to Fidel Castro, and in 1979 he returned as Minister of the Interior until 1985. By the Third Party Congress in 1986 he had lost both the ministry and his Politburo seat.

He then rebuilt his career in electronics as head of the state company Copextel and later the Industrial Group for Electronics of the Ministry of Steel and Machinery, a hub for Cuban telecommunications, software and IT. In August 2006 he was named Minister of Informatics and Communications, a post he left in 2011 to oversee the construction, basic industry and communications sectors. He returned to the Politburo after Raúl Castro became President in 2008 and became a vice president of the government in 2009. In 2010 he led a Cuban commission sent to help Venezuela confront its electricity crisis.

On 19 April 2018 the National Assembly elected him Vice President of the Council of State, a post he held until 10 October 2019. On 21 December 2019 he was named Deputy Prime Minister, a role he still held at his death. In April 2021 it was agreed that he would not remain on the Central Committee. He was also a deputy to the National Assembly of People's Power.

Valdés was married twice. His widow is Alicia Alonso Becerra, an engineer who served as rector of the Technological University of Havana José Antonio Echeverría (CUJAE) and later as Vice Minister of Higher Education. They had three children: Fidel, Ernesto and Alicia Valdés Alonso. Ernesto Valdés Alonso has served as a diplomat at the Cuban embassy in Madrid. From an earlier relationship he had a son, the composer Ramiro Valdés Puentes, who lives in Miami, and press reports have also named another son, Agustín Valdés. Colleagues described him as a reserved man of few words who disliked speaking in the first person, and he remained active into his nineties, touring power stations and solar parks.

Valdés was a lifelong communist and a loyalist of Fidel and Raúl Castro. He described himself as deeply in love with the revolution, which he said "was not born to die, but to continue through time." As Minister of Informatics and Communications he defended restrictions on internet access as a response to United States hostility, calling the internet one of the "tools for global extermination" while acknowledging it was needed for development, and warning that "the wild colt of new technologies can and must be controlled."

In official Cuban memory Valdés is a founding hero of the revolution and of the Ministry of the Interior, one of the few men present at Moncada, on the Granma and in the westward invasion. He was among the last surviving historic leaders, outliving Fidel Castro by almost a decade and leaving Raúl Castro as one of the few remaining. The government declared official mourning and buried his ashes beside the Las Villas guerrilla fighters near Che Guevara's memorial in Santa Clara.

Outside official circles his legacy is defined by the security state he built. Al Jazeera called him the architect of Cuba's notorious intelligence apparatus, and the New York Times headline described him as the architect of Cuba's surveillance state. His death came days after the Communist Party approved the largest overhaul of Cuba's economic strategy since 1959.

Honorary rank of Commander of the Revolution (1976). Hero of the Republic of Cuba with the Order Playa Girón, conferred by the Council of State on 19 April 2001 for the 40th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs victory. Hero of Labour of the Republic of Cuba (2018). Commemorative Medal for the 50th Anniversary of the 26th of July (2003). Prize for Life's Work (Premio por la Obra de la Vida). Illustrious Son of Villa Clara.

The Argentine journalist Jorge Ricardo Masetti portrayed Valdés in his 1960 book Los que luchan y los que lloran. He seldom gave interviews; Cubadebate and the Mesa Redonda programme broadcast a long "En persona" interview with him, which Cuban media said broke the myth that "Ramiro Valdés does not give interviews." His son Ramiro Valdés Puentes was the subject of a 2004 Telemundo 51 series titled The Commander's Son.

As founder of the G2 and head of the Interior Ministry, Valdés oversaw the security services in the years of revolutionary tribunals, executions, mass detentions and the campaign against the Escambray insurgents. Critics, including Martí Noticias, the Cuba Center and Cuban exile politicians, held him responsible for surveillance, arbitrary arrests, torture and executions, and described him as the organiser of terror in Cuba. He was also linked by critics to the export of Cuban security methods to Nicaragua and Venezuela. US Representative Carlos Giménez wrote that he died without ever facing justice for crimes against the Cuban people. Valdés was never tried for any of these allegations, and the Cuban government rejected them.

Valdés died on the morning of Sunday 21 June 2026 in Havana, aged 94. The Communist Party, the State and the Government announced his death; no cause was given. Cuba decreed official mourning. On 23 June Raúl Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel stood the first honour guard beside his ashes at the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and long queues of people filed past. Beside the urn was the Cuban flag he had brought back from Bolivia with Che Guevara's remains. On 25 June 2026, in keeping with his wishes, his ashes were interred with military honours in the Mausoleum of the Las Villas Front at the Ernesto Che Guevara Sculpture Complex in Santa Clara, where Díaz-Canel gave the funeral oration.