Here are the facts. Cuba’s Ramiro Valdés Menéndez has died at 94 years old. Commie dictator Fidel Castro called Valdés an ally and a friend from the earliest days of his unfriendly takeover of Cuba. Valdés was considered the last remaining revolutionary, among those who took Cuba from a thriving U.S. tourism destination and turned it into a third-world enclave for Soviet Union operatives and other commies and America-haters.
More specifically, Valdés is credited with creating the Cuban surveillance state that kept Castro and the commies in power, and he didn’t do it gently. He did it by terrorizing his own people. His spy system was merciless, ruthless, and oppressive. His legacy is countless imprisoned and “missing” Cubans, broken families, a dilapidated country, and generations who were forced to live in poverty.
But since he was as old as he was, and the Cuba we know today has been this way for so long, not only have most Americans never heard of him, but they really haven’t cared. This enables propagandists on the left to rewrite history and somehow make one of the bad guys of history a sympathetic figure.
Let’s go to some headlines from the legacy media breaking the news of this man’s death:
- New York Times – “Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, Architect of Cuba’s Surveillance State, Dies at 94”
- ABC News – “Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, a key figure of the Cuban Revolution and ally of Fidel Castro, has died”
- RTL Today in Luxembourg – “'Hero of the Republic': Legendary Cuban spy chief Ramiro Valdes dies at 94”
- Reuters – “Ramiro Valdes, lauded as hero of Cuban revolution, dies at 94”
- Associated Press – “Cuban Revolution figure Ramiro Valdés Menéndez dies at 94”
- France’s AFP – “Legendary Cuban spy chief Ramiro Valdes dies at 94”
Ramiro Valdes, lauded as hero of Cuban revolution, dies at 94 https://t.co/HL4w9CEykj https://t.co/HL4w9CEykj
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 21, 2026
As the Western world becomes more socialist, the headlines reflect this shift. Europe downright considers this formidable enemy of Western and democratic culture a hero now.
Behind those nice headlines lies the truth, which the Center for a Free Cuba has well documented. According to the Center, Valdés oversaw a control apparatus that “institutionalized terror, political killings, and the export of revolutionary violence and repression with the founding of the secret police, and foreign espionage services.”
The Center added, “For many Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and those who suffered under the systems of repression he built, his death marks the end of an era defined by control and political killings rather than the liberation promised in the 1950s.”
Valdés was born in Artemisa, Cuba. He was part of Castro’s revolution from the very beginning. Once Castro took power, the bearded dictator trusted Valdés to serve as his minister of the interior, starting in 1961 through 1968, and again from 1979 through 1985.
Valdés created Cuba’s “State Security apparatus (G2),” he was vice president of the country’s Councils of State and Ministers, he was Deputy Prime Minister, and a Politburo member. The Center for a Free Cuba says that he also had served as minister of Informatics and Communications.
But if you want a sense of why Castro leaned on Valdés to maintain control over the Cuban people, the Center has this:
“Valdés played a central role in building and directing the apparatus responsible for systematic repression. As founder of G2 and head of MININT, he oversaw surveillance, arbitrary arrests, torture, and executions that defined the early decades of the regime.
Estimates of the overall death toll under the Castro government, for which Valdés bore significant responsibility through the security structures he created and led, vary but are consistently in the tens of thousands:
- R.J. Rummel estimated 35,000 to 141,000 deaths by democide (government killing), with a median of 73,000.The Black Book of Communism documented 15,000–17,000 people shot between 1959 and the late 1990s.
- Cuba Archive has documented 7,193 deaths: 5,728 by firing squad, 1,207 extrajudicial killings, and 1,216 deaths in prison. Earlier compilations reached over 31,000 cases.
- Additional thousands died in the Escambray counterinsurgency campaign (estimates by British historian Hugh Thomas placed the number killed of at least 4,000 guerrilleros), prison conditions, and attempts to flee by raft (“rafters”), with upper estimates reaching tens of thousands of deaths at sea over decades.
These figures encompass firing-squad executions, extrajudicial killings, deaths from torture and neglect in custody, and violent suppression of resistance.”
Don’t look for any of these details in the glowing rewriting of history that's happening in real time as leftist obituary writers jump into propagandist high gear. They’d rather you think of him as nothing more than a “key figure,” an “architect,” a “spy chief.” Or even “a hero,” instead of the reality that he was a Castro henchman.
Valdés didn’t earn these nicknames for nothing: "The Butcher of Artemisa," "Pool/puddle of blood," and "The Hangman of Cuba."
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