After Castro came to power in 1959, Valdés held high government positions for decades. Until 2019, he was an influential member of the ruling Cuban Communist Party.
He was one of Fidel Castro’s closest collaborators. In 1956, he was among 82 revolutionaries who disembarked in Cuba on the Granma yacht to launch an armed uprising against the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Only a handful of them survived the expedition. During the revolution, he fought alongside Ernesto “Che” Guevara and participated in the final battles that led to the fall of the Batista regime in 1959.
During his political career, he held a number of important positions, including Minister of the Interior, Deputy Minister of Defense, Minister of Information and Communications, and Vice President. Even after the arrival of the younger generation of politicians around President Miguel Díaz-Canel, he remained one of the important figures of the regime. In recent years, as deputy prime minister, he mainly oversaw the resolution of the protracted energy crisis and frequent power outages.
In 1960, Valdés was a member of the delegation led by Raúl Castro that came to Czechoslovakia, and he completed intelligence training there. At the end of 1982, he visited Prague as the Cuban Minister of the Interior and discussed mutual relations and security cooperation with the highest representatives of the country.
