Ramiro Valdés, diehard communist revolutionary who helped oust Cuba’s dictator Batista in 1959
As a leading enforcer of state security, Valdés was feared, not liked, and his enemies dubbed him ‘Charco de Sangre’ or ‘Pool of Blood’
Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, who has died aged 94, was one of the small, original cast of the Cuban Revolution. He was involved in the abortive assault on the Moncada Barracks in 1953, returned from exile in Mexico with the Castro brothers and Che Guevara on the yacht Granma in 1956 and took part in the Sierra Maestra campaign which drove the military dictator Fulgencio Batista from power in 1959.
The revolution accomplished, he became one of the chief enforcers of a different sort of dictatorship, that of the Communist Party of Cuba. When the rebel army entered Havana he was made head of its intelligence service and later had two terms as interior minister, from 1961 to 1968 and 1979-85. As such, he was responsible for arresting thousands of dissidents following the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion by the US and Cuban exiles in 1961. He was also a deputy defence minister.
Rarely appearing in public, Valdés kept his Trotsky-like goatee beard and continued to wear olive-green combat fatigues after coming to power. He was a member of the politburo and one of the few rebels to hold the honorary title of Commander of the Revolution.
In 2001 he was declared a Hero of the Republic. Ten years later he was elected the Communist Party’s No 3 leader, after Raúl Castro, Fidel’s younger brother, and José Ramón Machado, a fellow veteran.
Valdés fell out with Fidel in the 1960s and 1980s, but after each demotion he found his way back to the heart of power. His loyalty to the revolution and its one-party system never wavered. “At the outset, you join the revolution out of your own free will”, he told an interviewer in 1986, “but after that, forget it, there is no more deciding, no more free will. It’s what you have chosen to do, and it’s what you have to continue doing.“
A diehard revolutionary associated with state security, he was feared rather than liked. His enemies dubbed him “Charco de Sangre” or “Pool of Blood”, and in 2021, after anti-government protests had rocked the country, demonstrators in Palma Soriano in eastern Cuba called him a murderer and told him to clear off.
Ramiro Valdés Menéndez was born in Artemisa in western Cuba on April 28 1932 to a poor family whose ancestors had come from the Asturias in Spain. Having received little formal education, he worked variously in an electricity company and a shop and as an assistant to the driver of a sugar cane lorry.
He was 21 when he joined Fidel Castro’s armed revolution, being the first person, on July 26 1953, to break into the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba, where he was slightly wounded. He was sentenced by a special tribunal and detained on the Isla de Pinos off western Cuba until he and his fellow revolutionaries in what was then the Movimiento 26 de Julio were amnestied by Batista in 1955. They went into exile in Mexico, from where they trained an invasion force.
In 1956 he was one of the 82 rebels who landed from Granma in south-eastern Cuba, rising to become second-in-command of a column led by Che Guevara which broke out from the Sierra Maestra into the central lowlands.
After his second spell as interior minister Valdés became director of national electronics, a project later placed under the information technology and communications ministry. From 2005-11 Valdés was its minister. In 2007 he defended restrictions on the internet, calling it “one of the tools of global extermination”, while at the same time recognizing its value as a means of development.
From 2009 to 2019 Valdés was vice-president, with oversight of both the legislature and executive. At the time of his death he was deputy prime minister, with a special responsibility for power black-outs, a chronic weakness exacerbated by an American blockade on oil shipments to the island. He was a familiar figure alongside President Miguel Díaz-Canel, urging people to turn out the lights and maintain their revolutionary fervour.
Valdés is survived by his wife, Alicia Alsonso Becerra, and their four children, the eldest of whom, Ramiro Valdés Puente, is a well-known composer living in Miami.
Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, born April 28 1932, died June 21 2026
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
