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.  

en.wikipedia.org

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.

cubacenter.org

  

 

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. 

 

cubacenter.or

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.  

Improper Conduct: Fidel Castro, and the communist persecution of homosexuals in Cuba, Russia, and China

“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.” - Fidel Castro, 1965

Film poster for the 1984 film Improper Conduct

Thirty four years ago on March 21, 1984 in France the film "Mauvaise Conduite" was released. The film was directed by two Cuban exiles,  Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal.  The title of the film in English is Improper Conduct and it examines the "moral purges" of the Castro regime that began in 1964 with 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.  Apologists of the Castro regime would like to forget this shameful chapter of the communist revolution in Cuba.

It is important to underscore that the systematic repression of homosexuals had an ideological component that also impacted policies in Communist China and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union homosexuality was criminalized in 1933, "punishable by prison and hard labor, and Stalinist anti-gay policies persisted throughout the 1960s and 1970s." In 1949 upon taking power in Mainland China the communists declared homosexuality a symptom of "bourgeois decadence" and set out to eliminate it.

Below is an online version of the entire documentary that is also available on Amazon.com.

Music Freedom Day 2016: Cuban music still censored by regime in 2016

 Reflection for Music Freedom Day

Rolling Stones to play free concert in Cuba on March 25th

The Rolling Stones have announced that they will perform a concert in Havana, Cuba on Friday March 25, 2016.  The free concert will take place at the Ciudad Deportiva de la Habana.  Before going any further, let me state for the record that I saw the band in concert during the Steel Wheels Tour in Miami, Florida at the Orange Bowl on November 15, 1989 and enjoy their music.

The international press has been dutifully reporting on how the Castro regime "prohibited the sale of the band’s records, considering its music a symbol of capitalism." However, this "cultural liberalization" of permitting foreign rock bands to play in Cuba is not new, but can be traced back to March 2, 2001 when the first major British rock band, The Manics, played in Cuba. Months earlier on December 8, 2000 John Lennon was "politically rehabilitated" on the 20th anniversary of his death, by no less than Fidel Castro who unveiled a statue, and by regime spokesmen who would try to claim him as an ideological fellow traveler.
  
Imposing systematic music censorship in Cuba
This censorship the Castro regime engaged in amounted to cultural genocide: banning musicians, musical groups, and genres that were viewed as decadent or counter-revolutionary. The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and later on John Lennon's solo music were officially banned for years along with the rock genre. 

Kenia Fernandez wrote an article in My Latino Voice titled "Nostalgia Corner: Why the Bolero was censored in Cuba" which describes how the crackdown on music began in Cuba: "First, jukeboxes were confiscated from corner bars and nightclubs (there were as many as 20,000 jukeboxes in Havana in the 1950s). Then, in 1961, at the First Congress of Writers and Artists, music was defined as an organ of integration into the new Revolutionary society." Two years later on March 13, 1963 Fidel Castro gave a speech 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 warned: “They should not confuse the Revolution’s serenity and tranquility with weaknesses in the Revolution. Our society cannot accept these degeneracies.”


This meant that members of these targeted groups including rock n roll fans were sent to work camps called the UMAP (Military Units to Help Production). Young Cubans were sent to prison work camps because they were caught listening to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Rock music which was developed in North America and Western Europe at that time by groups and musicians like: The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin, and Earth, Wind and Fire, was labeled decadent and counterrevolutionary.

Over the past 20 years rock n roll as a genre has been permitted in Cuba under the dictatorship, although it still censors content.

Censored and banned from Cuba by Castro: Olga Guillot and Celia Cruz

 It wasn't only rock that was censored, Cuban music was too
Many great Cuban musicians were marginalized and their music censored by the Castro regime beginning in the early days of the Cuban dictatorship. For example Kenia Fernandez in the previously mentioned essay "Nostalgia Corner: Why the Bolero was censored in Cuba" described how a Cuban musical genre was systematically censored:

The bolero came to be seen as a reactionary genre, in bad taste, and ultimately, banned. Cuba's world-class composers and performers, many of whom had brought the genre to its golden age, were abruptly silenced. Finally, in 1968, in the Ofensiva Revolucionaria -- the Cuban equivalent of China's Cultural Revolution -- most of the 1,200 cabarets and dance halls for which Havana was known were shut down (with only a couple of exceptions, including the notable Tropicana). Bolero lovers and performers were left with no viable venues.

The queen of the Bolero was Olga Guillot who passed away in exile in 2010. According to the book Shoot the singer!: music censorship today edited by Marie Korpe there is increasing concern within the international music community that post-revolution generations are growing up without knowing or hearing these censored musicians and that this could lead to a loss of Cuban identity in future generations.

Music performed by musicians who chose to go into exile criticizing the Cuban regime, such as the popular Celia Cruz and her orchestra, Sonora Matancera. were banned, their music censored, and it  forbidden to mention their names. The banning of Celia Cruz was especially tough because she was so popular before the revolution in Cuba.
 
Fake Change in Cuba: Celia Cruz and Olga Guillot still censored in Cuba in 2016
Diario de Cuba reported on August 21, 2012 that Tony Pinelli, a well known musician and radio producer, distributed an e-mail in which Rolando Álvarez, the national director of the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television Instituto Cubano de Radio y Televisión (ICRT) confirmed that the music of the late Celia Cruz would continue to be banned. The e-mail clearly stated: "All those who had allied with the enemy, who acted against our families, like Celia Cruz, who went to sing at the Guantanamo Base, the ICRT arrogated to itself the right, quite properly, not to disseminate them on Cuban radio." The irony that it was the Castro regime, that acted against Cuban families dividing them for over half a century, in 1962 had denied Celia Cruz's request to return to Cuba to attend her mother's burial. She never again tried to return to Cuba and passed away in 2003. 

Cuba's cultural genocide continues in 2016 and icons of Cuban music such as Celia Cruz and Olga Guillot remain banned from the airwaves and must be discovered in Cuba on the black market and in the underground.  

Olga Guillot and Celia Cruz music still banned in Cuba

In 2016 the music of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles play over the official airwaves in Cuba while the music of late Cuban icons Celia Cruz and Olga Guillot remains banned in Cuba. What does it say about the regime in Cuba that British and American rock bands are now heard over the airwaves in Cuba and are playing concerts in Cuba and at the same time the music of Cuban musicians of the stature of Celia Cruz and Olga Guillot remains censored in Cuba, even though they passed away years ago?