Reflections by comrade Fidel
RAHM EMANUEL
What a strange name! It is easy to pronounce and it sounds
as if it were Spanish but it is not. Among tens of thousands of names I have
read of students and compatriots and people I have met in my life, I had never
heard that name before.
Where does it come from? I thought. Once and again,
the name of Inmanuel Kant, the most brilliant German thinker, came to my mind.
Kant, with Aristotle and Plato made up the trio of philosophers with the
greatest influence on the human thought. As I would learn later, this was not
far from the philosophy of the man closest to Barack Obama, the current President
of the
Another recent possibility led me to reflect on the
strange name. This time it was the book by German Sanchez, Cuban ambassador to
the Bolivarian Venezuela, entitled “La
transparencia de Enmanuel”, although in this case the name was written
without the letter “I”, the first in the name of the German philosopher.
Enmanuel is the name of the child conceived and born
in the thick forest occupied by the guerrilla, where his very worthy mother
Clara Rojas Gonzalez became a prisoner on
I had read with great interest the abovementioned book
by German Sanchez, our ambassador to the
Clara had stayed with the guerrilla in solidarity
with Ingrid whom she accompanied in her six years of tough captivity.
German’s book is entitled “La transparencia de Enmanuel”, almost exactly the name of the
German philosopher. I was not surprised the mother had given such a name to her
child for she is a talented and learned attorney. It simply made me recall my
years of imprisonment in solitary confinement due to the almost successful
assault on the second military fortress in
Of course, that was not the only objective or the
only idea in which we found inspiration, but the truth is that after the
victory of the revolution in our homeland on
“The wise man can change his opinion; the fool never
does.”
“Do not treat others as a mean to attain your
objectives.”
“A man can only grow to be a man through education.”
This idea was one of the principles proclaimed since
the first days of the revolutionary victory of
Rahm Emanuel joined the Israeli Army as a volunteer
in 1991, during the first Golf War unleashed by Bush, sr., using uranium-loaded
rockets that caused serious illnesses to
Ever since that war, the peoples of the Near and Middle East have become consumers of enormous
amounts of armaments placed in the market by the
If the extreme right racists were able to quench
their thirst for ethnic superiority and assassinate Obama as they did Martin
Luther King, a great human rights leader, which is theoretically possible,
although it does not seem likely at the moment given the protection provided to
the President every minute of the day and night after his election.
Obama, Emanuel and all of the talented politicians
and economists they have brought together would not suffice to solve the
growing problems of the American capitalist society.
Even if Kant, Plato and Aristotle were resurrected
together with the late brilliant economist John Kenneth Galbraight, they would
neither be capable of solving the more frequent and deeper antagonistic
contradictions of the system. They would have been happy in the days of Abraham
Lincoln, so much admired, and rightly so, by the new President; but those days
are now far behind.
All the rest of the peoples will have to pay for the huge
waste and ensure, first of all on an increasingly contaminated planet, the
American jobs and the profits of that country’s big transnational.
Fidel Castro Ruz