The top five crimes of Ramiro Valdés Menéndez

 

 Ramiro Valdés Menéndez (1932–2026) was a Cuban revolutionary commander, one of the survivors of the Granma expedition, a key participant in the 1953 Moncada Barracks attack and the Sierra Maestra campaign, and a close associate of Fidel and Raúl Castro.   

 

After the 1959 victory, he held senior roles including Minister of the Interior (twice: 1961–1968 and 1979–1985), founder and head of the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) and its G2 State Security apparatus, and later Vice President.  

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He died on June 21, 2026, at age 94. The Cuban dictatorship portrayed him as a loyal “Commander of the Revolution” and hero who helped build and defend the socialist state.   

 

Critics, including Cuban exiles, dissidents, human rights observers, and outlets like Center for a Free Cuba and Diario Las Américas, describe him as one of the primary architects and enforcers of the regime’s repressive security apparatus, often using nicknames such as “El Carnicero de Artemisa” (Butcher of Artemisa), “Charco de sangre” (Pool/Puddle of Blood), and “El Verdugo de Cuba” (The Executioner/Hangman of Cuba).  

 

 He has been compared by some to Lavrentiy Beria.

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Specific personal orders for individual crimes are difficult to document publicly because many actions were systemic under his command as head of intelligence and interior security. 

 

Ramiro Valdez, Raul Castro, Fidel Castro and Mengistu Mariam

 

The following are the main alleged crimes and repressive activities attributed to him or carried out under his direct oversight, drawn from regime critics, former prisoners, exile accounts, and documentation of the Castro era:1. Post-Revolutionary Executions and Purges (1959 onward)Valdés was involved early in the revolutionary tribunals and security structures. He served in a leadership role (sometimes described as second-in-command or involved) at La Cabaña fortress in Havana, where numerous Batista-era officials, police, and opponents were executed by firing squad, often under Che Guevara’s oversight. 

 

He assisted or was present during some of these executions in La Cabaña and Santa Clara. As head of the DIER (Department of Investigations of the Rebel Army), the precursor to G2, he directed repression against remaining opposition groups.  

diariolasamericas.com

 

 

The broader apparatus he helped build is linked to thousands of documented firing-squad executions and extrajudicial killings in the early years of the regime (part of estimates ranging from several thousand to over 10,000+ across the Castro period, per sources like Cuba Archive and the Black Book of Communism).2. Suppression of the Escambray Insurgency (“Limpia del Escambray,” 1960s–1970s)Valdés oversaw or directed counterinsurgency operations against anti-Castro guerrillas in the Escambray Mountains. This included:

• Forced displacement and relocation of thousands of peasants from their lands to “captive towns” or distant areas, separating families.
• Establishment of concentration/forced-labor-style camps in the region (e.g., La Sierrita, Arroyo Blanco, El Condado).
• Alleged involvement in specific atrocities, such as the La Ceiba massacre, where 19 men were reportedly executed by machine gun.
  diariolasamericas.com

Government forces killed thousands of guerrillas and civilians in these operations; critics describe excesses, summary executions, and collective punishment.3. UMAP Forced Labor and Re-Education Camps (1965–1968)Valdés collaborated with the armed forces in creating and operating the Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción (UMAP) camps. An estimated ~30,000 people were sent there without judicial process, including:

• Homosexuals and others targeted under “Operation of the Three Ps” (prostitutes, pimps, pederasts).
• Religious believers (especially Jehovah’s Witnesses), artists, intellectuals, and perceived dissidents or “counter-revolutionaries.”

Conditions involved forced agricultural labor, psychological and physical abuse, isolation, and attempts at ideological re-education. These camps are widely condemned as sites of persecution based on sexual orientation, religion, and political views.

cubacenter.org

4. Creation and Oversight of the Totalitarian Police StateAs founder of MININT and G2 (modeled on Soviet KGB and East German Stasi practices), Valdés built and directed:

• The Comités de Defensa de la Revolución (CDR) — neighborhood watch committees for mass surveillance, informants, and denunciations.
• Widespread arbitrary arrests (hundreds of thousands at peak times, e.g., during the Bay of Pigs invasion), prolonged political imprisonment without fair trials, and harsh prison conditions.
• Interrogation and torture methods, including beatings, electroshock, prolonged isolation, temperature extremes, “truth serum” (sodium pentothal), and other psychological tactics. Critics also allege plans to plant explosives in prisons (e.g., Isla de Pinos) to suppress potential uprisings.
  diariolasamericas.com

The system he institutionalized is blamed for a large share of the regime’s political repression, contributing to estimates of tens of thousands affected by executions, imprisonment, torture, or death in custody over decades.5. Export of RepressionLater in his career (including as a consultant in Venezuela around 2010), he helped train and advise security forces in allied countries, notably Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro. This included embedding Cuban G2-style methods of infiltration, interrogation, and control. He was also linked to broader Cuban support for revolutionary movements and groups abroad. 

 

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Important context: No international tribunal convicted Valdés of these acts; he died without facing formal accountability for the alleged crimes. 

 

In summary, Valdés’ “worst crimes” are his central role in institutionalizing a totalitarian security state—through early executions, the Escambray campaign, UMAP camps, and the pervasive G2/CDR apparatus—that enabled mass political repression, persecution of minorities, and thousands of deaths or ruined lives.  

Ernesto "Che" Guevara born on this day in 1928. Nothing to celebrate.

 A mass murdering racist, who dined with Mao as millions died of hunger is not someone to celebrate.

"All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword." - Matthew 26, 26:52

Some wish to celebrate Ernesto Guevara's birthday today. If he and his comrades had their way the world would have been subjected to a nuclear holocaust in October 1962, and they were bitterly disappointed that it did not happen.

Thankfully, John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev reached a peaceful outcome to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the Castro regime protested it and was unhappy with their Soviet allies not launching their nuclear missiles. 

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's essay "Tactics and strategy of the Latin American Revolution (October - November 1962)" was posthumously published by the official publication Verde Olivo on October 9, 1968, and even at this date was not only Guevara's view in 1962 but the official view in 1968: 

"Here is the electrifying example of a people prepared to suffer nuclear immolation so that its ashes may serve as a foundation for new societies. When an agreement was reached by which the atomic missiles were removed, without asking our people, we were not relieved or thankful for the truce; instead we denounced the move with our own voice."

In the same essay, the dead Argentine served as a mouthpiece for Fidel Castro declaring: "We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims." Castro and Che were so outraged that the regime reached out to Nazis to purchase arms and train the regime's security services.

Castro and Che were not alone in their criticism. Mao Zedong also criticized Khrushchev for backing down in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and this was the last straw in a series of slights between the two communist powers that set the stage for the Sino-Soviet split. 

However Castro eventually backed off and returned to the Soviet camp whereas Che Guevara embraced the Maoists. 

This should not have been a surprise.

Mao Zedong had already been in power in China for a decade when the Castro regime took power in Cuba in 1959.  In September 1960 Havana diplomatically recognized the Peoples Republic of China. Between 1960 and 1964 the two communist dictatorships would collaborate closely together.

Mao's regime in 1958 embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a campaign to reorganize the Chinese populace to improve its agricultural and industrial production along communist ideological lines. The campaign was a disaster that led to mass famine and a death toll of at least 45 million.

In the midst of the famine Ernesto "Che" Guevara with a Cuban delegation visited Mainland China and met with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and other high ranking Chinese officials in 1960 to discuss conditions in Cuba and in Latin America, and the prospects for communist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. As millions starved in China the two revolutionaries dined through several courses of traditional Chinese food.

Che and Mao dine in 1960 while millions starved in China.

Finally, on the question of race and sexuality the Argentine revolutionary had retrograde views that some today continue to ignore or excuse.

Unlike Mohandas Gandhi, who truly evolved in his views on race as a young man but is still attacked for them, Che Guevara seems to get a pass despite not showing an equivalent evolution. Politifact on April 17, 2013 quoted from The Motorcycle Diaries, a book based on diaries the Argentine kept while traveling through Latin America in the early 1950s.

"The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese. And the two ancient races have now begun a hard life together, fraught with bickering and squabbles. Discrimination and poverty unite them in the daily fight for survival but their different ways of approaching life separate them completely: The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations."

 "The Establishment" writing in the publication AfroPunk cited the above quote but dismissed it as something  Guevara wrote when "he was around 24 years old." He then goes on to say that he " went so far as to fight with an all black army," but failed to cite his critical quotes against the Africans he fought alongside.

Politifact in 2013 quoted this comment from Guevara’s writing on his time fighting with black revolutionaries in the Congo that included this line: "Given the prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to handle their weapons and did not want to learn."

It wasn't the Congolese, but Che's failure to train them that led to defeat. The other side that defeated Guevara's forces were also Congolese, but he tried to pass off his own incompetence with a racist excuse. 

However in another area Mr. Guevara has even more to answer for. In the same diary he refers to homosexuality in a negative context:

"The episode upset us a little because the poor man, apart from being homosexual and a first-rate bore, had been very nice to us, giving us 10 soles each, bringing our total to 479 for me and 163 1/2 to Alberto."

Fidel Castro in a March 13, 1963 speech was clear in his distaste for the "effeminate" were he openly attacked “long-haired layabouts, the children of bourgeois families,” roaming the streets wearing “trousers that are too tight,” carrying guitars to look like Elvis Presley, who took “their licentious behavior to the extreme” of organizing “effeminate shows” in public places.  The Cuban dictator, and Guevara's comrade, warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degenerates.”

Two years later in 1965, Fidel Castro spoke explicitly about the Cuban Revolution's views on homosexuals:

“We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true revolutionary, a true communist militant.” ... A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be.” 

In 1964 the Cuban revolutionaries began rounding up Gays and sending them to Military Units to Aid Production or UMAPs (Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción). These forced labor camps were for those suspected of or found guilty of "improper conduct."  Persons with effeminate mannerisms: what the Cuban government called "extravagant behavior" were taken to these camps. 

Ernesto "Che" Guevara was in the revolutionary leadership in Castro's Cuba throughout this process and did not leave Cuba until 1965.

Castro put him in charge of La Cabaña prison and in the first half of 1959 presided over the executions of hundreds of Cubans, reported Andres Vargas Llosa in 2005.

Che Guevara addressing the United Nations on December 11, 1964 did not mince words: "We must say here something that is a well-known truth and that we have always asserted before the whole world: executions? Yes, we have executed people; we are executing people and shall continue to execute people as long as it is necessary.

Guevara bragged of the executions being carried out in Cuba.

 Between 1959 and 1964 the numbers of Cubans executed was in the thousands. This is nothing to celebrate.  However the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) disagrees with this assessment and celebrated the above speech with an excerpt that ends with "Fatherland or Death!" This is why I protested the United States rejoining UNESCO in 2003, and celebrated leaving it again in 2017.

#OTD in 1928 the mass murderer Ernesto Che Guevara was born. An innocent child who grew into a plague. Shamefully, institutions like @UNESCO, not only pay homage to this brutal, racist & homophobic mass killer. They also spread his toxic and murderous ideas. #BirthOfAMonster pic.twitter.com/ELrwqBFJsJ

— John Suarez ن (@johnjsuarez) June 14, 2026

In the video below you can watch the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century meet his Latin American protege.

Lessons from Tiananmen Square 37 years later

 How it started, and how it was crushed, but what will be its final legacy?

Chinese students march under a banner of late Chinese reformer Hu Yaobang

When Chinese reformer Hu Yaobang died suddenly of a heart attack on April 15, 1989, students responded angrily, with the majority of them assuming that his death was related to his forced resignation. On the day of this reformer's sudden death, small, spontaneous gatherings to mourn Hu began around Tiananmen Square's Monument to the People's Heroes.   

The death of Hu gave the motivation for students to congregate in large numbers. Posters sprouted on university campuses eulogizing him and demanding for Hu's legacy to be honored. Within a few days, the majority of posters addressed bigger political themes such as corruption, democracy, and press freedom, and the protests continued.

On April 27, 1989 soldiers try to stop students entering Tiananmen Square.

On April 26, 1989, the People's Daily published an editorial aimed at scaring students into submission, but it had the opposite effect, enraging them and rallying thousands more to demonstrate in Tiananmen Square.  It was a strategic error of the first order committed by the Chinese Communist regime's highest echelons.

Imagine for a moment that for 51 days of demonstrations beginning on April 15, 1989 thousands of students gathered nonviolently to protest and demand reforms. Protests had taken place before in China in 1986, but had not been sustained.  This time, in part due to the regime's demonizing of the student demonstrators, the protests grew and did not dissolve. 

At the height of the student movement in China, over one million people marched in the streets of Beijing. This movement ended with the government's crackdown and the Beijing massacre of June 4. 

Below is the documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, that captures the days of protest leading up to the crackdown and the massacre.

Nonviolent resisters should learn as much as they can about this important movement. Finally, the struggle for a free China continues to the present day and needs our solidarity.

It is also important to challenge the official narrative that nothing happened, or worse that it was a "vaccination." Thousands were killed, and it was not just students, but also workers in solidarity with student protesters.

At least 10,000 killed during the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Chinese Communist Defense Minister Wei Fenghe on June 2, 2019 at a regional forum defended the Tiananmen Square massacre claiming "[t]hat incident was a political turbulence and the central government took measures to stop the turbulence, which is a correct policy." 

The official newspaper, The Global Times, doubled down claiming that the mass killings and crackdown were "[a]s a vaccination for the Chinese society, the Tiananmen incident will greatly increase China's immunity against any major political turmoil in the future." The message is clear the Communist Chinese regime in China is willing to kill large numbers of Chinese to remain in power.

Bodies at Shuili hospital mortuary. All died from bullet wounds. Credit Jian Liu

A 2017 declassified British diplomatic cable revealed that "at least 10,000 people were killed in the Chinese army's crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in June 1989."

The Pro-Democracy Movement that had taken to the streets in April of 1989 was violently crushed by the Chinese communist dictatorship beginning on the evening of June 3, 1989.

Between June 3 and June 5, 1989 other tank drivers ran over protester

By dawn on June 4, 1989 scores of demonstrators had been shot and killed or run over and crushed by tanks of the so-called People's Liberation Army.

On June 5, 1989 in Beijing, following the massive and bloody crackdown after six weeks of protests that began in Tiananmen Square and spread across 400 cities in China, a man risked all to protest what had taken place. 

Wearing a white t-shirt, black trouser, and carrying what appeared to be a shopping bag he walked out on the north edge of Tiananmen Square, along Chang'an Avenue and faced down a column of Type-59 tanks.

We must also remember the courage of the late Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo who saved the lives of many young Chinese in Tiananmen Square in June of 1989 obtaining safe passage for them and persuaded these students to leave before the massacre unfolded.  This courageous and nonviolent human rights defender was jailed in 2008 and died on July 13, 2017.

Below is one of his last interviews prior to being unjustly imprisoned.