[1] A veteran of the Cuban Revolution, Valdés fought alongside Fidel Castro at the attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 and was a founding member of the 26th of July Movement.

[3] He is the father of the Cuban composer Ramiro Valdés Puentes, awarded Cuba's First National Prize of Composition, who currently lives in Miami and in 2004 was the protagonist of a Telemundo 51 news series titled "The Commander's Son".

[citation needed] By 1969, the Politburo, the former central policy-making and governing body of the Cuban Communist party, decided to remove Valdés from the Ministry of the Interior, replacing him with Sergio del Valle Jiménez, a comandante and MINFAR's first deputy minister.

In the beginning, it was a very small project, but soon it became the hub for the development of Cuba's telecom, software and IT industry—in growing association with Japanese, Korean, and Chinese enterprises.

At an international conference on communications in Havana, Valdés defended Cuba's "rational and efficient" use of the Internet but warned that "the wild colt of new technologies can and must be controlled."