The organs of State Security, with the decisive support of the people and as an integral part of them, have systematically defeated, since March 26, 1959, the subversive plans, attacks, acts of sabotage, and other actions that the United States orchestrated over these 67 years to overthrow the Cuban revolutionary process.
In early March 1959, following instructions from Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz, the idea of merging the Department of Investigations of the Rebel Army (DIER), the G-2 of the National Revolutionary Police (G-2 PNR), created in January, and the Bureau of Naval Investigations (BIN), an apparatus inherited from the Batista dictatorship, was implemented to form a single, better-prepared institution that would respond to the interests of the people.
On March 26 of that same year, the three existing security services were officially united into a single body, which initially retained the name DIER, and was placed under the command of Commander Ramiro Valdés Menéndez. From its inception, Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz and Commanders Raúl Castro Ruz and Camilo Cienfuegos Gorriarán dedicated special attention to the work of the DIER. Fidel personally directed many of the intelligence and counterintelligence operations carried out to uncover and neutralize the covert plans of the United States government and its subversion and espionage services.
Commander Manuel Piñeiro Losada also played a crucial role in this effort, accompanied by then-Captains Joaquín Méndez Cominches, Eliseo Reyes Rodríguez (San Luis), José María Martínez Tamayo (Papi), Orlando Pantoja Tamayo (Olo), and First Lieutenant Enio Leyva Fuentes, among other officers.
On June 6, 1961, a date soon to mark its 65th anniversary, the Council of Ministers of the Revolutionary Government enacted Law 940, officially establishing the Ministry of the Interior (MININT), and Commander Ramiro Valdés was appointed its head.
The new institution absorbed the G-2 Intelligence Directorate of the MINFAR (Ministry of the Revolutionary Armed Forces) and created the Department of State Security (DSE), whose first head was then-Captain Isidoro Malmierca Peoli.
Among the actions that the State Security agencies have confronted throughout the years of the Revolution are assassination plots against key Cuban leaders. In particular, 638 assassination attempts against Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro were recorded up to 2007, in different stages of development.
Of these, more than a hundred plots were carried out, all of which were thwarted, even though they had the means, opportunity, and designated perpetrators. They failed due to the actions of the security services or the cowardice of their authors. To this must be added Fidel's intuition for detecting ambushes, which on more than one occasion saved him from the planned assassination.
Not only the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but also the U.S. State Department, planned Fidel's assassination and assessed the potential consequences.
From 1960 onward, the CIA intensified the development of plans to assassinate him. Most of the files revealed in the Church Committee report of the U.S. Senate date from those years, along with others that have not yet been released. This demonstrated that no other political leader in the world had so many assassination plots hatched against him, nor had any other been subjected to such persecution, both within and outside their country.
The methods planned to kill Fidel Castro were numerous, although all failed, despite the use of snipers, explosives placed in his shoes, poison injected into a cigar, a small explosive charge inside a baseball, explosive mollusks, a diving suit infected with fungus, a pen-syringe, bacterial poison, and explosives under the presidency of public events, among many other variations employed.
They not only tried unsuccessfully to physically assassinate Fidel, but also to destroy him morally and intellectually, damage his image, and discredit his ideas through press, radio, and television campaigns, films, documentaries, and by employing all the creative capacity and technological and scientific power of the world's greatest superpower toward that objective.
The DSE also acted throughout these years against acts of ideological subversion, bombings of cities, airports, sugar mills, and cane fields, sabotage of the economy, military invasions, infiltration of terrorist groups, encouragement and support of terrorist organizations including insurgent bands, the smuggling of weapons and explosives, espionage, and the introduction of pests and diseases into the country.
The foundational roots of the Cuban security services can be traced back to December 1956, to the early stages of the guerrilla struggle in the eastern mountains against the tyranny of Fulgencio Batista. Some of the initial missions of these services, such as protecting the life of the Leader of the Revolution, were carried out by then-Captain Juan Almeida Bosque, Universo Sánchez Álvarez, Faustino Pérez Hernández, and their closest comrades in the first guerrilla campaign of the 26th of July Revolutionary Movement in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
In the 63 years since the revolutionary triumph, more than a hundred combatants from the Cuban security and intelligence services have given their lives in defense of national sovereignty, in honorable internationalist missions, or carrying out risky, anonymous tasks within counterrevolutionary organizations to protect the people from their terrorist actions. They are all enshrined in the pantheon of the Fatherland, although the names of some cannot yet be revealed, and the sacrifice of their lives must remain silent for now, because, as Martí said, some things must be kept hidden to be achieved.