The empire’s untenable position

[dipsydoodle]

R e f l e c t i o n s o f F i d e l C a s t r o

Havana. May 20 2011

NO one can be sure that, in its agony, the empire might not drag humanity into a catastrophe.

As is known, as long as human life exists, everyone has the sacred responsibility to be optimistic. Ethically, any other type of behavior would be inadmissible. I remember well a day, almost 20 years ago, when I said that one species was in danger of extinction: the human race.

Before a select group of bourgeois rulers enamored of the empire, including the massive, well fed German Helmut Kohl and others of his ilk who dutifully followed Bush Sr. – less sinister than his own son W. Bush, I couldn’t resist expressing that truth, which I consider very real in all sincerity, although still far removed today.

Turning on the television at approximately 12:15 midday, because some one had told me Barack Obama was making a speech about foreign policy, I paid attention to his words.

I don’t know why, despite the piles of dispatches and news that I read daily, I hadn’t seen any reporting that this individual would speak at that time. I can assure readers that there are more than a few foolish items and lies that, among dramatic truths and events of all kinds, I read, listen to or view as images every day. This was, however, something special. What was he going to say this time with the world bearing the burden of imperial crimes, massacres, unpiloted aircraft dropping deadly bombs, that not even Obama, now responsible for some life and death decisions, could have imagined as a Harvard student just a few dozen years ago?

No one assumes, therefore, that Obama owns the situation; he only manages a few important words that the long-standing system which originally conceded to the "Constitutional President" of the United States. At this point, 234 years after the Declaration of Independence, the Pentagon and the CIA hold the fundamental instruments created by the imperial power: technology capable of destroying the human species in a matter of minutes and the means to penetrate societies, shamelessly trick and manipulate them whenever they need to do so, thinking that the empire’s power is limitless. They expect to manage a docile world, with no disturbance whatsoever, well into the future.

This is the absurd idea upon which they base the world of tomorrow under "the reign of liberty, justice, equality of opportunity and human rights," incapable of seeing what in reality exists with poverty, a lack of elemental educational and health services, employment and worse: the failure to satisfy basic needs such as food, potable water, shelter and many others.

Curiously, someone could ask, for example, what will happen with the 10,000 deaths every year caused by violence related to drugs, fundamentally in Mexico, to which could be added Central American countries and several others, among the most populous in the continent’s south.

I do not wish to offend these peoples in any way; my intention is to indicate what happens to others almost everyday.

One question which does need to be asked immediately is: What will happen in Spain where the masses are protesting across the country’s principal cities, because 40% of young people are unemployed, to cite only one of the reasons this combative people is demonstrating? Are the bombings, by any chance, about to begin in this NATO country?

Nevertheless, at this time - 4:12 p.m. - the blessed official Spanish version of Obama’s speech has yet to be published.

I hope you will pardon me for this improvised Reflection. I have other things with which to occupy myself.

Fidel Castro Ruz

May 19, 2011

4:16 p.m.

(Translated by Granma International)

http://www.granma.cu/ingles/reflections-i/20-mayo-empire.html

Mods : there is open permission from Granma , the Cuban State newspaper, to republish Fidel Castro's Reflections / Essays complete, unamended, in their entirety.