I always heard that Fidel Castro loved to give four hour long speeches, but I never really stopped to think what he actually talked about. Is this what it's like? It's worse than the Film Noir professor I had in college whose lectures were a hopeless mash of: recollections about his battle with alcoholism ("alcoholics like to think they can get better just by switching from hard liquor to beer, but believe me it doesn't work") , speculations on the sexuality of actors in the 1940s, and panegyrics to his dog (who was admittedly very cute).

Here are some of Castro's thoughts on Rham Emanuel's name:

What a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it’s not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.

Where does it come from? I wondered. Over and over, the name came to mind of the brilliant German thinker, Immanuel Kant, who together with Aristotle and Plato, formed a trio of philosophers that have most influenced human thinking. Doubtless he was not very far, as I discovered later, from the philosophy of the man closest to the current president of the United States, Barack Obama.

Another recent possibility led me to reflect on the strange surname, the book of Germán Sánchez, the Cuban ambassador in Bolivarian Venezuela: The transparence of Enmanuel, this time without the “I” with which the German philosopher’s name begins.

Enmanuel is the name of the child conceived and born in the dense guerrilla jungle, where his extremely honorable mother, Colombian vice presidential candidate Clara Rojas González, was taken prisoner on February 23, 2002, together with Ingrid Betancourt, who was a presidential candidate in that sister country’s elections that year...