The former spy Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, national coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR), publicly congratulated Brigadier General Oscar Alejandro Callejas Valcarce on his birthday, a high-ranking official in the Ministry of the Interior (MININT) sanctioned by the United States for his role at the head of the Revolutionary National Police (PNR) during the protests on July 11, 2021.
A lifetime dedicated to the Revolution, from the glorious ranks of @minint_cuba. Happy Birthday to General Callejas, Head of the Political Direction of the Ministry of Interior!, wrote Hernández on X.
The congratulation once again highlights Callejas Valcarce, who for years held managerial positions within the Cuban police structures and currently leads the Political Directorate of MININT.
The United States personally sanctioned the Cuban general on July 30, 2021, just a few weeks after the historic anti-government protests of July 11.
The Treasury Department then placed the PNR and two of its top officials on its sanctions list: Callejas Valcarce, who served as the Police Director, and Eddy Manuel Sierra Arias, the deputy director of that institution.
Washington justified the measure by citing the actions of police forces during the protests and the subsequent arrests of demonstrators. U.S. authorities attributed to the PNR participation in violent actions against citizens who took to the streets and in the arrests of opponents and demonstrators.
The sanctions involved the blocking of Callejas' assets and interests under U.S. jurisdiction, as well as restrictions on transactions with individuals and entities from the United States.
In May, amid a new expansion of Washington's measures against structures of the Cuban government, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) updated the designations related to MININT and PNR under the sanctions program against Cuba.
Hernández Nordelo's congratulations come, moreover, after the CDR themselves were added by the United States to the list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN).
On June 4, the OFAC sanctioned the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, an organization that Hernández Nordelo has led since 2020 and constitutes one of the main territorial structures created by the Cuban regime, which the failed spy aims to revitalize.
The measure affects the organization and does not, in itself, imply that Hernández Nordelo is individually sanctioned by OFAC.
The CDR were created by the dictator Fidel Castro in September 1960 and spread throughout neighborhoods across the country. Although they officially engage in community activities, they have historically served functions of political surveillance and mobilization in support of the government.
Hernández Nordelo himself has publicly defended on various occasions the strengthening of the so-called "revolutionary vigilance" in the neighborhoods.
Before taking over the leadership of the CDR, Hernández Nordelo was the leader of the Wasp Network, a Cuban intelligence structure dismantled by U.S. authorities in the late 1990s.
He was sentenced in the United States in 2001 to two life sentences plus 15 years in prison for the crimes for which he was found guilty. He returned to Cuba in December 2014 after being released in the context of the rapprochement between the governments of Barack Obama and Raúl Castro.
The congratulations this Sunday thus link two figures who have been associated for decades with the security and political control structures of the totalitarian Cuban state: Hernández Nordelo, leading CDRs sanctioned by Washington since June, and Callejas Valcarce, the current political chief of MININT, individually sanctioned by the United States since 2021.
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