Only 18 hours of mourning for the nonagenarian, whose body will lie in state on Tuesday morning at the headquarters of the Ministry of the Armed Forces.
14ymedio, Madrid, June 23, 2026 — Cuba’s official press has devoted extensive coverage to the death of Deputy Prime Minister Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, a historic member of the Cuban Revolution and one of the principal ideologues and enforcers of repression, whose death became known on Sunday. The flood of coverage—figurative, in an era of lean times for the print media—stands in contrast to the brevity of the official mourning period decreed by Miguel Díaz-Canel: barely 18 hours for a period of mourning that entails no expense.
From 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday, June 23, until midnight the same day, the national flag will fly at half-staff on public buildings and military institutions throughout the Island. It is a short period, although less striking when compared with the lengthy nine days of mourning declared for Fidel Castro, yet surprising given that 48 hours were decreed for Nelson Mandela and three days for Spanish dictator Francisco Franco.
Valdés’s remains will lie in state during the morning of Tuesday at the headquarters of the Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Havana, which six months ago hosted a similar event: a tribute to the 32 Cuban fighters killed in Venezuela during the U.S. operation to capture Nicolás Maduro. It was precisely at that event that concerns about the nonagenarian’s health were raised, as he was notably absent, in contrast to the presence of a frail but relatively steady Raúl Castro, who is one year older than he is.
State television announced on Monday that “in fulfillment of Valdés’s final wish, to rest alongside his comrades in struggle and near the Heroic Guerrilla Fighter (Ernesto Che Guevara),” his remains “will be interred on the morning of Thursday, June 25, in a ceremony with military honors at the Mausoleum of the Las Villas Front, in the city of Santa Clara.” At the same time, tribute ceremonies will be held in all provincial capitals and in the special municipality of Isla de la Juventud.
State television announced on Monday that “in fulfillment of Valdés’s final wish, to rest alongside his comrades in struggle and near the Heroic Guerrilla Fighter”
State media have lavishly praised Valdés and the missions he carried out, including “the search, location, exhumation, and transfer to Cuba of the remains of Ernesto Che Guevara and his fellow guerrillas from Bolivia.” However, the claim that the Santa Clara mausoleum houses the Argentine guerrilla’s bones has been challenged on numerous occasions, to the point that physician Moisés Abraham Baptista, who performed his autopsy, once challenged the Cuban regime to conduct a DNA test on the remains to prove their authenticity.
Numerous accounts in books and journalistic articles maintain that Guevara was secretly cremated by the Bolivian army and that his ashes were scattered in the jungle precisely to prevent his grave from becoming a site of ideological pilgrimage. Castroism, however, succeeded in creating an alternative narrative and, consequently, the symbolic site that the mausoleum has become today. There, Valdés will rest beside, if anything, Guevara’s hands, the only remains that could have been taken to Cuba according to the account of Cuban-American Félix Rodríguez, the CIA agent who directed the operation in Bolivia.
Valdés’s death further reduces the small group of historic leaders who still maintain a public or institutional presence, among them Raúl Castro, José Ramón Machado Ventura, Guillermo García Frías, and Ramón Pardo Guerra. The rest of the members of the regime’s original leadership have either died or disappeared from political life.
Translated by Regina Anavy
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