In Camagüey homage to Body of Keepers

By: Adolfo Silva Silva

Camagüey. The Body of Keepers of Camagüey received today a recognition for its contributions to the environmental protection, granted by the Provincial Council of the Juvenile Technical Brigades (BTJ).

The delivery of the acreditative diploma endorses the dissimilar tax to the preservation of the nature, included the actions to impact in the invigoration of the popular conscience toward the sector.

The care of the values of the vegetation and the fauna, as well as to prevent and to extinguish forest fires, figure among the objectives of the entity.

Samples of that work evidence a singular importance in the protected areas, where govern special status of preservation of the natural environment.

The homage to the Body of Keepers was made in the opening of the event "Forgers of the Future" correspondiing to the capital of the county.

That encounter is part of the municipal appointments that constitute the culmination of the referred contest in the whole country, favored by the BTJ, and which does without of the provincial and national forums in the current year.

Investigations carried out by 736 authors classified toward the current phase of the competition in the territory of Camagüey, after the competitions in the base.

The production of foods, the energy saving and the protection of the environment center the thematic of the works selected for the present stage, signal until September.

Near 10 thousand 700 members have in Camagüey the BTJ, created in 1964 by initiative of Fidel.

OBAMA HAS NO EASY TASK | Reflections by Comrade Fidel

I remember that, when I visited the People’s Republic of Poland, during Gierek’s government, I was taken to Osviecim, the most notorious of all concentration camps. There I learned about the horrible crimes committed by the Nazis against Jewish children, women and senior citizens, which resulted from the implementation of the ideas contained in the book Mein Kampf written by Adolph Hitler. Those ideas had been implemented before at the time when the territory of the USSR was invaded in the quest for vital space. By that time, the governments of London and Paris incited the Nazi chief against the Soviet State.

The Soviet army liberated the prisoners kept at Osviecim and those of almost all the Nazi concentration camps, condemned those events and took pictures and films which traveled around world.

Obama spoke at the Buchenwald concentration camp, within the German territory. A granduncle of his, who is still alive and was accompanying him at the rally, had helped to release the prisoners of that camp.

The most important activity he carried out in Europe was his attendance to the celebration of the 65^th anniversary of the Normandy landing, where he pronounced a second speech. He went out of his way to praise Dwight Eisenhower, who commanded the landing. He recognized, in all fairness, the courage of the American soldiers who fought down a few kilometers of coastline, with the support of the US and the British navy and of thousands of planes that came mostly from the US factories. The paratroopers divisions were not dropped at the most correct positions and therefore the battle extended unnecessarily.

The bulk of Hitler’s army and its elite divisions had been annihilated by Soviet soldiers at the Russian front, after they recovered from the damages caused by the first military attack. The resistance put up by the city of Leningrad to a prolonged siege, the combats waged by the Siberian divisions a few kilometers away from Moscow, and the battles of Stalingrad and of the Kursk salient will go down in the history of wars as some of the most significant and decisive events.

Obama, who spoke at the celebration of the 65^th anniversary of the Normandy landing, thanks to which, as can be inferred from his speech, Europe was liberated, dedicated only 15 words to speak about the role played by the USSR --hardly 1.2 words per every 2 million Soviet citizens who died in that war. That was not fair.

After the end of that bloody war, Iran, which played a significant role in that war given its natural resources and its geographical position, was turned by the United States into its strongest and better armed gendarme in that strategic Asian region.

The Iranian people, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, with the masses unarmed and ready to make any sacrifice, overthrew the powerful Shah of Iran. That happened during the last two years of the government of Jimmy Carter, who suffered the first consequences of the wrong foreign policy of the United States. That policy shortened his mandate and facilitated Ronald Reagan’s coming to power.

The Shah died on July 27, 1980, in Cairo, the same city where Obama delivered his speech on June 4 last.

The absurd war between Iraq and Iran which began in 1980 lasted 8 years and was not caused by Khomeini. Reagan got as much as he could out of it. He first sold weapons to Iran. With those weapons and the revenues from drug trafficking he funded the dirty war against Nicaragua, thus evading the decisions adopted by the Congress whereby it refused to grant funds for that cruel adventure that took the life of so many ‘Sandinista’ youths. Reagan supported Iraq’s war against Iran.

The US government authorized the supply of raw materials, technology and gases for the chemical war against Iran, which killed tens of thousands of soldiers of that country; the civil population was severely affected. American companies collaborated in the manufacturing of chemical weapons. Besides, satellites provided the necessary information for all land operations; 600 000 Iranians and 400 000 Iraqis died in that war; hundreds of billions of dollars were spent by those two major oil producing countries before both parties accepted the peace project drafted by the United Nations.

It is not an easy task for a US President to deliver a speech at the Muslim University of Al-Azhar of Cairo. Nor is it to be expected that the Iranians and the Arabs would feel very enthusiastic about said speech.

Fidel Castro Ruz
June 14, 2009
4:36 p.m.

Humboldt and Gauss in the Streets of Havana

The German Culture Festival brought Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) once again to the streets of Havana, this time accompanied by his compatriot Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), known as the Prince of Math, one of the men who anticipated the course of non-Euclidian Geometry.

GERMAN NOVELIST Daniel Kehlmann.

The two learned men came hand in hand with the novel La medición del mundo (Measuring the World), a book that has become one of the most internationally resounding successes from that European country’s field of letters in this first decade of the new millennium. It was presented at the house named after the German naturalist, located in Old Havana’s historical area.

The novel, taking a meeting between Humboldt and Gauss, recreates the parallel lives of these men who lived in the same epoch, but the author takes good care not to offer a biographical version.

La medición del mundo, on the contrary, goes for the delusions and certainties of their intellectual and human concerns, for the nobility and misfortunes of the two men, and has an imaginative literary construction that takes the novelist close to the resources of Latin American magic realism.

It’s an enjoyable narration that includes, besides the main characters, others like a declining Emmanuel Kant, a Daguerre that nervously wants to capture a blurred picture, and a heretical and hedonistic Bompland, very different from the pale image usually given of Humboldt’s American adventure companion.

Daniel Kehlmann (Munich, 1975) studied philosophy and literature and lives in Vienna. His first novel was published when he was 22 years old. But it was Yo y Kaminski (Kaminski and I), published in 2003, that won him both the favor of critics and the public for the first time. His novel Ich und Kaminski (Yo y Kaminski, Barcelona, 2005), from 2003, gave him world fame. With La medición del mundo (2005) he has experienced the great leap forward.

"I wanted to write like a crazy historian", he said when asked what was true and what wasn’t in a story that, although it’s a tribute to memory and intelligence, contradicts the rigorous Cartesian codes of European rationalism.

The author has won the Kleist Prize, one of the most illustrious German awards, and was a finalist in the Deutscher Buchpreis (German Book Prize / PEDRO DE LA HOZ).