There is a colt in the Cuban imagination that has been running loose for thirty years, and the man who tried hardest to break it died last month without ever managing it. Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, who founded the secret police and twice ran the interior ministry and helped wire the apparatus of fear that governed Cuba from 1959 onward, made his most quoted remark late in life, when he was handed the communications and technology portfolio at an age past seventy. The internet, he said, was like a wild colt — something that needed to be tamed before it could be of any use. He died on June 21, 2026, at ninety-four. The colt is still running.
The wire copy will note the dates and the titles and move on. What it will not tell you is the particular geometry of this death. Valdés died not in some frozen revolutionary amber but inside a Cuba that, in the very week he passed, was approving the largest free-market overhaul of its economy since 1959. The Communist Party of Cuba, the institution Valdés spent his life serving, was simultaneously announcing decentralization measures designed to loosen the government's grip on enterprise, expand the private sector, and permit imports and exports without state intermediation. The man who built the cage died while the party was quietly widening the bars.
He was, by any honest accounting, a figure of genuine menace. Born in Artemisa in 1932, he was barely twenty-one when he joined Fidel Castro's failed assault on the Moncada barracks. Three years later he was among the roughly eighty fighters who sailed from Mexico aboard the Granma to restart the rebellion — of those, only about a dozen survived the landing, a group that included Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara. Valdés fought under Guevara at the Battle of Santa Clara, the clash that broke Batista's army in late 1958. That record earned him the rank of Comandante de la Revolución, a title only a handful of men ever held. After 1959, he built and twice ran the Ministry of the Interior — MININT — the body that runs Cuba's police, intelligence, and state security services, including the G2, the surveillance and repression apparatus modeled on the Soviet KGB. His nicknames inside Cuba — "El Carnicero de Artemisa," "Charco de sangre," "El Verdugo de Cuba" — were not bestowed ironically.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel mourned him publicly as a man of "absolute fidelity" to Fidel and Raúl Castro, and praised his "exemplary dedication to the homeland." Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega echoed the tribute, praising what he called Valdés's unbending revolutionary character. The regime's grief is legible: Valdés was one of the last biological threads connecting the current technocrat government to the men who actually made the revolution with their hands. His death narrows the living founders of 1959 to essentially Raúl Castro, now ninety-five, and Guillermo García Frías. When Raúl goes, Díaz-Canel will have no one left to introduce him to the room where it happened.
This is the real weight of the moment, and it is not primarily about Valdés himself. It is about what his death marks: the end of the revolution as a living witness. The Cuban state has always derived an unusual portion of its authority not from democratic mandate or economic performance, but from the physical, embodied presence of the men who made it. Fidel was the revolution. Raúl is the revolution. Valdés was the revolution's muscle memory — the man who knew where the bodies were buried, who had built the machine bolt by bolt, who could not be dismissed as an inheritor or an administrator because he had been there at the very start. Díaz-Canel cannot claim that. No one in the current leadership can.
The counterargument deserves its moment. It is possible — not sentimentally, but analytically — that the death of the founding generation creates space for something that their presence foreclosed. The original commanders were ideologically petrified. They had staked their lives on the revolution's permanence, which meant any meaningful reform carried the silent accusation of admitting error. Díaz-Canel has no such stake. He did not fight in the Sierra Maestra. He did not sail on the Granma. He can introduce a market reform without it feeling like a personal confession of defeat, because the defeat, if it comes, will be measured against his management rather than his mythology. The passing of Valdés, and the generation he represents, may be precisely what makes genuine reform theoretically possible — even if the 176-point package announced this month looks more like administrative triage than structural transformation.
But that is the optimistic reading, and Cuba does not reward optimism cheaply. The 2015-to-2017 opening under Obama was the last moment when external goodwill and internal exhaustion aligned closely enough to make real change imaginable. That window closed, did not reopen, and the decade since has been a study in how a state can be simultaneously reforming and retreating — announcing decentralization while preserving GAESA's unaccountable grip on the financial architecture, promising private enterprise while maintaining the single-party system that decides who is permitted to enter the race. The founding generation is dying. The system they built is not.
And then there is the colt. Valdés spent his final years in the communications ministry because someone in the leadership understood, correctly, that the internet was the most dangerous thing the revolution had ever faced — more dangerous than Miami, more dangerous than the embargo, more dangerous than any exile radio signal. He was the right man for the job, being the man who had broken so many other things. But a colt is not a dissident. You cannot arrest it or surveil it or strip its residency. When Cubans in July 2021 took to the streets for the first time in the revolution's history, holding their phones aloft and filming everything, chanting in Palma Soriano at the face of the old man himself, the colt had already jumped the fence. The crowds that day were filmed shouting the word asesino at him in the street. He survived that, too. He was ninety-three at the time.
He died on a Sunday morning in Havana, and the announcement came from Díaz-Canel's phone, posted to X — the platform, the wild colt, the thing Valdés had spent years trying to tame — before it appeared anywhere in state media. There is no irony register adequate to that fact. The last great architect of Cuban information control was eulogized on the very instrument he had failed to domesticate, by a president posting in real time to a global network he cannot shut down, in a country where the lights are still going out for forty hours at a stretch.
The colt broke the fence a long time ago. The man who held the rope is gone. What comes next will be decided by people who never had the rope to begin with, governing a country that has been running wild, in the dark, since before they arrived.
Natalia Suyos writes for Cuba Journal on Business.
