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Reflections by comrade Fidel
CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN OBAMA'S POLITICS AND ETHICS
A few days ago I referred to some of Obama's ideas which point to his role in a system that denies every principle of justice.
Some throw their hands up in horror if anything is said to criticize the important personality, even if it is done with decency and respect. This is usually accompanied by subtle and not so subtle darts from those with the means to throw and transform them into the elements of media terror imposed on the peoples to sustain the unsustainable.
Every criticism I make is always construed as an attack, an accusation and other similar qualifiers reflecting callousness and discourtesy towards the person involved.
This time I'd rather address some questions of many that could be raised and that the new President of the United States should answer.
The following for example:
Whether or not he renounces his prerogative as President of the United States --that his predecessors with few exceptions exercised as a right per se-- to order the assassination of a foreign political adversary usually coming from an underdeveloped country?
By any chance, has any of his many assistants ever informed him of the sinister actions carried out by former presidents from the days of Eisenhower through the years 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, and 1967 against Cuba, including the mercenary Bay of Pigs [Giron] invasion, the terror campaigns, the introduction to our territory of a great amount of weapons and ammunitions, and other similar actions?
It is not my intention to blame the current President of the United States, Barack Obama, for actions conducted by former presidents when he had not been born or when he was just a 6-years-old boy born in Hawaii to a black Moslem Kenyan fathers and a white Christian American mother. On the contrary, this is an exceptional merit of the U.S. society and I am the first to admit it.
Is President Obama aware that for decades our country was the victim of deliberately introduced viruses and bacteria carrying diseases and plagues which affected people, animals and plants? Does he know that some of them like the Hemorrhagic Dengue Fever later became a scourge that took the lives of thousands of children in Latin America and that other plagues impinge on the economy of the peoples of the Caribbean and the rest of the continent as collateral damages that have yet to be removed?
Does he know that several politically submissive Latin American countries, which are today embarrassed by all the damages they caused, also took part in such terrorist and economically harmful actions?
Why is our country the only one in the world enduring the imposition of a disrupting Cuban Adjustment Act which promotes trafficking in persons and other events that take the lives of people, mostly women and children?
Was it fair to impose on our people an economic blockade lasting almost 50 years?
Was it right to arbitrarily demand from the world to accept the extraterritorial application of this economic blockade which can only bring hunger and shortages to the people?
The United States cannot meet its vital needs without extracting large mineral resources from a great number of countries often limited in their exports of them by the intermediate process of refining. In general, when it is convenient to the interests of the empire, these products are traded by big transnational companies operating with Yankee capital.
Will that country renounce such privileges?
Would that renunciation be compatible with the developed capitalist system?
When Mr. Obama promises to make large investments to be self-reliant in oil, despite the fact that his country is today the largest market in the world, what could the future be of those countries whose main revenues come from exporting that energy as many of them lack any other significant source of income?
After the crisis, once the competition and the fight over the markets and sources of employment is unleashed again, as it is usually the case among those who are better off and more efficient in the monopoly of that technology with sophisticated means of production, what possibilities will be left to the not developed countries dreaming of industrialization?
The efficiency of the new vehicles manufactured by the auto industry notwithstanding, will they use the procedure demanded by the ecology to protect Humanity from the increasing deterioration of the climate?
Will the blind philosophy of the market be able to replace that which only rationality could promote?
Obama promises to mint enormous amounts of money to foster the quest for technologies that can multiply the production of energy whose absence would paralyze modern societies.
He includes the nuclear power plants among the sources of energy he promises to hastily develop. These are already opposed by a high number of people due to the high risks of accidents with disastrous consequences for life, the atmosphere and human food. It is absolutely impossible to prevent the occurrence of some of these accidents.
Modern industry has already contaminated all the seas on the planet with the release of toxins, even without such accidental disasters.
Can the conciliation of such contradictory and antagonistic interests be rightly promised without transgressing ethics?
The U.S. House of Representatives with a Democratic majority launched the extremely protectionist slogan of "buy US goods", to please the unions that supported his campaign. This tramples on a basic principle of the World Trade Organization, since every nation in the world, be they big or small, dream of their development based on trading goods and services; however, only the big and rich among them have the privilege to survive to realize such dream.
The Republicans in the United States, discredited by the actions of the reckless Bush administration, soon reacted against the measures taken by Obama to please his allies in the unions. Thus is wasted the credit given by the voters to the new President of the United States.
As an old politician and fighter I commit no sin by modestly exposing these ideas.
As hundreds of news from the political, scientific and technological circles are published every day, many questions could be raised for which there are not easy answers.
Fidel Castro Ruz
February 4, 2009
5:14 p.m.
A QUICK RESPONSE
The response came hardly a few hours later in the voice of the White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. It doesn't matter if he chose not to mention my modest Reflection. It's the response that counts.
He said to the journalists that it is the Cuban American community President Obama is interested in. It was the first time he addressed the subject after the inauguration. From the Cubans with the right to vote due to their ancestry in the state of Florida, 3 to 1 voted for the Democratic candidate. He is not interested in the almost 12 million Cubans who live in the island.
When the man closest to the President was asked who his candidate was in Cuba he declined to elaborate on the issue and said that the lesser that was said on Cuba, the better.
He said that Cuban Americans will be permitted to travel to Cuba and to send remittances.
But he did not even mention the American citizens' right to travel.
The Cuban Adjustment Act and the Blockade did not deserve any comments from him.
Thus rather sooner than later Obama's politics is losing its virginity.
Fidel Castro Ruz
February 5, 2009
7:02 p.m.
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 United States.
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 February 23, 2002. She had been a candidate to vice-president of Colombia in the same ticket with Ingrid Betancourt who was running for the presidency of that sister nation in the election to be held that same year.
I had read with great interest the abovementioned book by German Sanchez, our ambassador to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, who had the privilege of taking part in 2008 in the release of Clara Rojas and Consuelo Gonzalez, former deputy to the National Assembly for the FARC, the revolutionary army of Colombia, which made them prisoners.
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 Cuba on July 26, 1953 to seize thousands of weapons with a selected group of 120 combatants willing to fight against the Batista's tyranny imposed on Cuba by the United States.
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 January 1st, 1959, I still remembered some of the German philosopher's aphorisms:
"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 January 1st, 1959. Obama and his advisor had not been born; they had not even been conceived. Rahm Emanuel was born in Chicago on November 29, 1959, to an immigrant of Russian descent. His mother Martha Smulevitz, a civil rights advocate, was sent to prison three times for her activities.
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 U.S. troops taking part in the offensive on the retreating Iraqi Republican Guard and to an incalculable number of civilians.
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 U.S. industrial military complex.
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
February 8, 2009
5:16 p.m.
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