With profound sorrow, the leadership of the Party, the State, and the Government inform our people that on the morning of Sunday, June 21st, the historic Commander of the Cuban Revolution Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, Hero of the Republic of Cuba and of Labor, passed away. He left behind a brilliant and extraordinary record of service to the nation.
Comrade Ramiro was born in Artemisa on April 28th, 1932. From very humble origins, with the guidance of his mother, who was a follower of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and José Martí, he knew how to face the difficulties of the capitalist system and develop the highest patriotic values.
As a young man, he worked as a lineman's apprentice and fought against injustices suffered by electrical workers. The 1952 coup d'état caught him in the fields of a sugar mill, where he was hauling cane. He quickly joined the fight against the Batista dictatorship, under Fidel's guidance, and alongside other young men from Artemisa who, like him, participated in the attacks on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes barracks on July 26th, 1953.
From then on, he was on the front lines of combat alongside Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz and Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, toward whom he expressed boundless admiration, loyalty, and unwavering fidelity in the struggles for a better Cuba.
That was always the unwavering stance of the Moncada attacker, the political prisoner on the Isle of Pines, the revolutionary exiled in Mexico, the Granma expeditionary, and the second in command of Column No. 8 under Commander Ernesto Che Guevara.
After January 1, 1959, when he arrived with the rank of Commander, obtained from the first moments of the struggle in the Sierra Maestra, Ramiro Valdés stood out for his qualities as a military chief and revolutionary leader who fulfilled numerous and high responsibilities, among which stand out those of Second Chief of La Cabaña, Military Chief in the central region and head of the organs of State Security in times as defining as those of the mercenary invasion through Bay of Pigs.
He served as Minister of the Interior, First Deputy Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), Aide to the Commander-in-Chief, President of the SIME Electronics Industrial Group, Minister of Information Technology and Communications, Vice President of the Councils of State and Ministers, and Deputy Prime Minister, a position he held at the time of his death. He was a founding member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and its Political Bureau, and a deputy to the National Assembly of People's Power.
He carried out important official, political and economic missions, such as the search, location, exhumation and transfer to Cuba of the remains of Che Guevara and his companions in Bolivia.
For his relevant merits he received multiple orders and decorations.
The example of the Commander of the Revolution Ramiro Valdés Menéndez will inspire the path of the new generations, who will forever see in him a paradigm of revolutionary, combatant and patriot, a dignified Cuban, with solid convictions and unlimited dedication to his people.
