"The general, as his friends called him, has left us. But the battle that Marx and Engels led as chiefs of the innumerable army of the proletariat continues. Encouraged by their ideas, by their slogans, the proletarians of all countries have united, will continue to strengthen their union and will finally win".
Those were the words of Pablo Lafargue, in front of the coffin of Frederick Engels. The Cuban physician and socialist thinker, as is known, was not only a disciple and son-in-law of Karl Marx, but also his companion in struggle.
Engels, born in 1820, was the faithful friend of Marx, with whom he shared The Holy Family; The German Ideology and the Communist Manifesto. However, he left works of obligatory quotations with them as the Anti-Dühring; The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State; Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of German Classical Philosophy, or The Role of Labor in the Transformation of the Monkey into Man.
It was his intellectual greatness, wrapped in a revolutionary and revolutionary thought, which also bequeathed to us that dialectical materialism is one of the essential methodological platforms of the Social Sciences. In Dialectics of Nature she attests to this.
Doctor in Historical Sciences Hassán Pérez Casabona highlights a singular edge of the thinker's genius, whose validity speaks of an advanced reasoning, when he observes that Engels stimulated the preparation in multiple disciplines of those called to develop the changes that would banish oppression.
"The bourgeois revolutions of the past only needed the universities to supply them with lawyers, the best raw material for the formation of their political leaders, but for the emancipation of the working class, doctors, engineers, chemists, agronomists and other specialists will also be needed, since it is a matter of mastering the direction, both of the political machine and of all social production, and this is not achieved with sound phrases, but with firm knowledge", reads the message he sent, in 1893, to the Congress of socialist students.
When today we talk about science, research, innovation and R+D+i cycles, he had gone ahead of us in time, and placed his light, precisely in the young people who, like yesterday, today are the force that will make history continue.
Fidel saw that light, and unleashed the torrent of knowledge that carried the Cuban Revolution, from the program conceived in Moncada, materialized in the Literacy Campaign, in 1961, embryo of the country of men of science that he said Cuba had to be.
The value of that human capital, of the knowledge of collective intelligence, is the essence of the model of the country we are today, heir to the preaching of Martí, Lenin, Marx and Engels, who today, 130 years after his physical departure, is felt in his conception of the revolutionary deeds: the revolution is the supreme act of politics.
