Inherency

1. The United States maintains an embargo that bars nearly all economic activity with Cuba a vocal minority undercuts any prospects for change in the near future. Guzmn 13 Emmy award winning journalist,
(Sandra, Jay-Z and Beyonc's trip to Cuba isn't the problem, the embargo is, CNN, May 8, Online: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/07/opinion/guzman-beyonce-jay-z-cuba/index.html)

The few but very influential pro-embargo lobby have put a stranglehold on a lucid discussion surrounding Cuba. Five decades of failed policy later, our nation is being held hostage unable to have a cogent discussion on anything Cuba-related. The U.S. embargo has not and will not work. Put in place in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, the policy is stuck in a time warp that has nothing to do with modern-day reality. The most enduring embargo in modern day history is a remnant of a Cold War past when the Soviet Union was the enemy and the world was on the brink of nuclear war. The thinking was that financial sanctions, which included a ban on travel by American citizens, would collapse the island economy and force people to revolt against Fidel Castro. Over the years, these sanctions have been eased or toughened depending on political winds. In 1992, disgraced New Jersey Rep. Robert Torricelli was behind one the cruelest acts which banned, among many things, food and medicine sales to Cuba and prevented Cuban-American families from sending cash to their relatives. These were
tough times and seeing many friends and families suffer because they couldn't visit their elderly mothers more than once every three years, or being prevented from sending them needed supplies, was very painful. Restrictions have eased under President Barack Obama but there

is

still a major ban. Enter Jay Z and Beyonc. It's 2013 and we need to debate Cuban policy earnestly. Members of Congress must stop the cowardice around the issue and stop humoring the delusions of passionate folks stuck in the 1960s for political votes and favor. The pro-embargo folks are ignoring the policy's epic failure and fail to recognize that U.S. policy has played into the hands of the Castro brothers, who have sinisterly used it to make the case to their people that if Cuba is starving and the island economy can't grow, it's because of this U.S. policy.

We propose the following plan: The United States federal government should remove its economic embargo against Cuba.

Contention one the Embargo

1. The US embargo against Cuba is an act of cultural erasure American imperialism is founded
on racist images of Cubans and economic paternalism Riley 6 (Shannon Rose, Doctor of Philosophy in performance studies with a special emphasis on critical theory, Imagi-nations in Black and
White: Cuba, Haiti, and the Performance of Difference in US National Projects, 1898-1940 http://www.academia.edu/1378319/Imaginations_in_Black_and_White_Cuba_Haiti_and_the_Performance_of_Difference_in_US_National_Projects_1898-1940)

In another overly simplistic and equally dismissive gesture, popular rhetoric justifies the U.S. economic and cultural erasure of Cuba through an embargo, which is in its 5th decade, by citing that trading with or traveling to Cuba constitutes a form of doing business with the enemy. According to this oversimplified logic, Cuba is the enemy because it is a communist country. Meanwhile, a club named Havana seems to exist in every major city in the U.S., serving up mojitos and playing salsa; you can download a compilation called mojito mix from iTunes Essentials to be part of the Cuban music craze, and HI Che is the stuff of Hollywood films and trendy militant fashionistas. Disproving the overly simple claim that communism is to blame seems almost too easy: we currently conduct regular trade with Chinathe other" Communist country, and the U.S. government grants its citizens permission to travel there for tourism, research, and/or business. Moreover, the U.S. government had business and trade agreements with the U.S.S.R. even during the height of cold-war paranoia. Appending the claim that Fidel Castro is a dictator is not all that helpful in defending the embargonot only because economic embargo has proven ineffectual against Castros regime, but also because it seems to provide the very resistance against which he articulates his anti-imperialist discourse. Although Castro may have become a dictator, U.S. foreign policy has occasionally supported such menas long as they were "our SOB. The U.S. government has looked the other way as long as dictators have participated in U.S. plans for economic development under the larger umbrella of spreading liberal democracy, or could be otherwise useful against another sworn enemy. There is more to it than communism or the fact that Castro is not our SOB. There is a longer history of images at work here and the current obsession with the 1959 revolution and Cubas communist status help make the erasure of earlier Cuban revolutions possible. Disavowed as sovereign political entities, Cuba and Haiti are made invisible in U.S. culture at least partly through an excess of redundant and easily repeatable images. Stereotypical images of black retribution, voodoo hysteria, and revolution, or fanatical communist tyrants with beards and cigars, mask the ways the two island republics are made to disappear through embargo, travel bans, multi-force occupations, and erased historiesincluding a particular history of U.S. imperialism centered on and mediated through Cuba and Haiti. The production of tropic (both tropc-ic and tropical) images is in active relation with the deletion of cultural memory. On one hand, the contemporary Joe Tourist" website for North American tourism in the Caribbean
does not include images of Haiti or Cuba on its map of the areathe map literally clips the island of Hispaniola in half in order to include the Dominican Republic, which shares the island with the Republic of Haiti, and exclude Haiti and Cuba/ On the other, the figure of the zombie" has become embedded in nearly all areas of U.S. culture, from the zombie horror film genre to more contemporary' usages in pop culture, philosophy, and cognitive neuroscience, such as Christof Kochs use of the term zombie agents, in his model of human consciousness. Speaking of zombie agents, John Searle notes that, philosophers have invented the idea of a 4 zombie to describe something that behaves exactly as if it were conscious but is not;5 the zombie, as a figure of the living dead or unconscious laborer, has always been a product/production of the white imagination. In this analysis I am much more interested in how the concept of the zombie has functioned in the U.S. imagi-Nation than in trying to understand how the concept of zombie has functioned in Haiti in any ethnographic sense. This is not to suggest that the image of the zombie does not have other contexts and usages, but to point to the ways in which the figure of the zombie forestalls certain types of white national anxiety in a U.S. context (see Chapter 4). Many of the

representational tactics used to depict Cuba and Haiti as somehow problematic, probably dangerous, and in need of the intervention of some superior power (usually the U.S.) are not new to U.S. foreign policy, news media, or popular cultural production. By the nineteenth century, rhetorical, pictorial, and performed images of Cuba and Haiti repeatedly depicted the two revolutionary (anticolonial) republics as threats to white U.S. sovereignty and as incapable of self-governmentat best, unruly children, at worst, murderous primitive blacks. Such images of Cuba and Haiti are as old as white U.S. empireand although they were in the making through the nineteenth century, such images were most prominent between 1898 and 1940 during the period encompassed by the War of 1898 and the overlapping military

occupation of Cuba and Haiti. Imagining and articulating violent and primitive blackness is a familiar tool of white economic imperialism. Combined with discourses on the failure of the radicalized other to achieve self-determination, such images mediate practices of military occupation, embargo, travel restrictions, and economic control. Taken together, these discourses, practices, and images constitute a major portion of the white U.S. imperial toolkit, and between 1898 and 1940, Cuba and Haiti were prime sites for its development and implementation. Cuba and Haiti had long been objects of imperial desire partly because they were perceived as possible threats to U.S. racial and economic security. But by the turn of the twentieth century,
the two republics were increasingly strategic to U.S. expansion because of their location on either side of the Windward Passage, the central seaway from the Atlantic to the newly constructed U.S. Panama Canal. Successfully opening the Panama Canal moved the U.S. forward as a global power by providing direct passage between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Nor was this some small feat, as the former governor of West Virginia noted in 1914, whoever controlled Cuba, Haiti, and the Canal Zone would largely control the commerce of practically half of the

Images of Cuba and Haiti constituted part of U.S. economic imperialism's founding discourse, and have become embedded in various layers and sites of the U.S. national imaginary. In this sense, the national imaginary is structured like a palimpsesta site for a kind of cultural history that is always actively performed: being erased and re-imagined. In the case of a palimpsest, it is not only that things are actively remembered and forgotten, but that the erasure retains its own ghostings partially erased and partially legible images embed in the national cultural imaginary.
world.9

2.The discourse of Empire symbolically whitewashes Cuban bodies by equating economic modernization with cleanliness the Embargo represents Cubas official designation as unclean Riley 6 (Shannon Rose, Doctor of Philosophy in performance studies with a special emphasis on critical theory, Imagi-nations in Black and
White: Cuba, Haiti, and the Performance of Difference in US National Projects, 1898-1940 http://www.academia.edu/1378319/Imaginations_in_Black_and_White_Cuba_Haiti_and_the_Performance_of_Difference_in_US_National_Projects_1898-1940) In Imperial Leather, Anne McClintock uses an

image from the Pears Soap advertising campaign to make important connections between cleanliness, soap, and British empire, or the culture of imperial domesticity. A Pears Soap ad from the late nineteenth century depicts a white-haired white man in a white military suit washing his hands at a basin in a ship cabin. In the four comers of the advertisement, images of ships carry crates of Pears' Soap around the world. In the bottom right, a dark-skinned native, sitting on the ground, is offered the gift of soap by an erect European colonial. The ad reads: The first step towards lightening The White Mans Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pears Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark comers of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest placeit is the ideal toilet soap.272 A similar advertisement by the British soap company shows the effects of
using their product in a set of before and after images. In the first image, a black child is placed in a tub of water and washed with Pears Soap.

Sanitation strategies are thus a part of empires toolkit, and like British colonialism, U.S. economic imperialism relied on rhetorics of purity/impurity that paralleled rhetorics of civilization/savagery. Empire white-washes the colonial other to reproduce its own clean image. In this context, the motion picture of the 911 U.S. Infantry performing their "morning wash becomes the standard by which to imagine other clean bodies. When Wood scrubs the body of the black Cubanfiguratively in the cartoon, and literally in his sanitation lawshe is inscribing body practices that mark the other as in need of sanitation even as they attempt to bring the darker body into the realm of clean and pure whiteness. Drawing together religious and imperialist discourses, soap, cleanliness, and sanitation came to stand in for notions of progress, modernization, civilization, and even AngloSaxon religious ideals. As Lester Langley notes, [m]indful of the biblical injunctions on cleanliness, Wood had proceeded to sanitize the islands towns by strict regulations on garbage disposal... paving of streets, and whitewashing of public places.2 4 This reveals a kind of sanitation-capital at work in imperial modernization projectsfrom the profitable contracts established
In the after image, the child is out of the tub and white from the neck down. between U.S. companies and Woods military' government in Cuba for the development of sanitation projects, etc., to the promise of future tourism permitted through such modernization. Tellingly, an article dated 1895 imagined the possibility of Cuba as a U.S. resort, once the necessary changes in sanitation and modernization could be made. Hotels in Havana, with modem appliances are all that is needed. Such appliances included at minimum the running water, plumbing, and private space necessary so that white tourists could perform their daily

to paraphrase Christian biblical rhetoric, cleanliness was next to white-liness, and white-liness was next to wealthiness (read capital).
toilette while on adventure in the tropics. Thus,

3. The impact isnt just symbolic the Embargo causes Afro-Cuban women to be seen as sacrifices so that
northerners can enjoy a good and free society Harrison 2 (Faye V, professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, Global Apartheid, Foreign Policy, and Human Rights, Summer
2002, Souls: Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 4(3): 48-68, http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/fayeharr/images/Global.pdf)

Cubas status as a socialist sanctuary is being destabilized under dollarization and the conditions of economic austerity that led to it. Social inequalities are re-emerging and becoming conspicuous, and
crime is becoming a problem. A red flag signaling the chang- ing times can perhaps be found in a troubling December 2001 incident in which five members of a family, including an eight-year-old child and a couple visiting from Florida, were murdered in a robbery in Matanzas Province. This heinous incident was unusual in that murders are extremely rare in Cuba and mass murders are unheard of.45 The economic crisis that has brought about this unprecedented crime wave has caused escalating unemployment and has reduced safety net provisionstrends that have impacted African-descended Cubans, and Afro-Cuban women in particular, more than any other segment of the population. With

less access to kin-mediated remittances from the disproportionately white emigr communities overseas, there is more pressure on Afro-Cuban women, who are more likely than white Cubans to live in female-headed households, to stand in long lines for rations, stretch the devalued peso, and make ends meet by any means necessary.46 Any means necessary has come to include doing own-account work trabajo por cuenta propiain the underground economy aligned with the growing tourist sector. For younger women, particularly those who fit the culturally constructed stereotype of la mulata, this is increasingly being translated into working as jineteras (sexual jockeys). This line of work reflects Cubas historical race, gender, and class boundaries.47 Desperate to lure foreigners to the countrys beaches and hotel resorts, the Cuban government itself has resorted to manipulating pre-revolutionary racial clichs by show- casing traditional Afro-Cuban religious rituals and art, traditional Afro-Cuban mu- sic, and Afro-Cuban women, who are foregrounded as performers in these commodified contexts.48 The
sexual exoticization of African-descended women has a long history in Cuba as well as throughout the African diaspora and the West, where variations on the theme of Black hypersexuality are rampant as either a positively valued essentialism or a fertility- or health- related social problem. Nadine

Fernandez questions the assumption that Black and mulatto women predominate in Cubas sex tourism by highlighting the role of a racially biased gaze in attributing Afro-Cuban womens interactions with male tourists to prostitution while perceiving white womens interactions in terms of alternative interpretations, including that of romance. Because of their greater access to dollars and to jobs in the tourist sector, white women are more likely to have privileged access to tourists in restricted venues (shops, restaurants, and nightclubs) where Afro-Cubans are not generally permitted to enter. Consequently, Afro-Cubans interact with tourists out- side tourist installations, making their meetings much more visible and scrutinized by the public eye.49 In the context of Cubas current crisis, traditional racial narratives of gender, race, and sexuality are being reasserted and rewritten to fit with recent restructuring.50 The U.S. embargo is a flagrant form of foreign intervention. Like official structural adjustment policies, it has been premised on an ideology of power, recolonization, and ranked capitals that assumes that Cubans are expendable troublemakersperhaps even harborers of terrorismwho deserve to be starved out of their defiant opposition to U.S. dominance. The same ideology that rationalizes the unregulated spread of commodification into all spheres of social life implies that Cuban womens bodies, especially Afro-Cubanas hypersexualized bodies, can be bought and sold on the auction block of imposed economic austerity without any accountability on the part of the papiriquis, or sugardaddies, of global capital. The implication of these policies is that Afro-Cuban families and communities can be sacrificed so that northerners can enjoy privilegesincluding that of living in a good and free societythat southern work- ers and peasants subsidize. Cubas current crisis is being negotiated over the bodies of its women, with African-descended women, las negras y mulatas, las chicas calientes (Black and mulatto women, hot sexy chicks), expected to bear the worst assaults against what remains in many ways a defiant socialist sanctuary.51

4. The hidden violence of these sanctions outweighs nuclear war the embargo is an act of economic warfare Gowans 10 (Stephen, writer for the Centre for Research on Globalization, Sanctions of Mass Destruction (SMD): US Sponsored Economic
Blockade Destroys North Koreas Health Care System, 7/20, http://www.globalresearch.ca/sanctions-of-mass-destruction-smd-us-sponsoredeconomic-blockade-destroys-north-korea-s-health-care-system/20215)

In contrast to wars easily observable casualties, the apparently nonviolent consequences of economic intervention seem like an acceptable alternative. However, recent reports suggest that economic sanctions can seriously harm the health of persons who live in targeted nations. [9] This has been well established and widely accepted in the cases of Iraq in the 1990s and the ongoing US blockade of Cuba. Political scientists John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote an important paper in Foreign Affairs, in which they showed that economic sanctions may have contributed to more deaths during the post-Cold War era than all weapons of mass destruction throughout history. [10] The dangers posed today by such enfeebled, impoverished, and friendless states as Iraq and North Korea are minor indeed, they wrote in 1999. It might be added that the dangers posed by North Korea to the
physical safety of US citizens are not only minor but infinitesimally small. Notwithstanding the fevered fantasies of rightwing commentators, North Korea has neither the means, nor the required death wish, to strike the United States. However, the danger the country poses to the idea of US domination and hence, to the banks, corporations, and major investors who dominate US policy-making are admittedly somewhat greater. Severe

economic sanctions, the Muellers contend, ought to be designated by the older label of economic warfare. In past wars economic embargoes caused huge numbers of deaths. Some 750,000 German civilians may have died because of the Allied naval blockade during World War I. [11] So long as they can coordinate their efforts, the two political scientists continue, the big countries have at their disposal a credible, inexpensive and potent weapon for use against small and medium-sized foes. The dominant powers have shown that they can inflict enormous pain at remarkably little cost to themselves or the global economy. Indeed, in a matter of months or years whole economies can be devastated [12] And with devastated economies, come
crumbling healthcare systems and failure to provide for the basic healthcare rights of the population.

have an ethical imperative to end the embargo the ongoing blockade represents a total war against the Cuban population reject the distinction between economic and military warfare Peters 6 (Phillip, researcher for the Lexington Institute, U.S. Sanctions Against Cuba: A Just War Perspective, 8/5,
5. You
http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/us-sanctions-against-cuba-a-just-war-perspective)

While the United States is using economic sanctions and not military force against Cuba, I argue that its actions can fairly be evaluated under Just War standards for two reasons. First, while economic sanctions are often used to exert an intermediate level of pressure that falls between diplomatic statements and the use of force, the aim of the U.S. sanctions against Cuba is equal to that of an armed conflict: to bring an end to a foreign government. The Administration does not apply the term "regime change" to its Cuba policy, but it clearly aims to change Cuba's political order -- to "hasten the end of the dictatorship in Cuba," in
Secretary Rice's words. When the commission's 2004 report was released, the State Department announced that when Cuban President Fidel Castro leaves office, the United States "will not accept a succession scenario," and "there will not be a succession" from one socialist government to another -- two clear signals that the

aim of the policy is to interrupt the process set forth in Cuba's

socialist constitution. And in specific regard to the 2004 family sanctions, a State Department official noted: "What is important to remember is that these are a means to an end: the end of the Castro dictatorship." Second, while U.S. sanctions affect the finances of the Cuban government, they also affect the welfare of Cuban citizens who are "noncombatants" -- they are targeted by the sanctions because they live in Cuba, not because they have a specific affiliation with the Cuban government. While U.S. sanctions are ultimately intended to change the Cuban government's behavior, the 2004 family sanctions in the first instance target family welfare, and use that impact as leverage to attempt to change Cuban government behavior. In this discussion, I will set aside the
debatable issue of whether the United States meets the Just War standard of having a just cause in seeking to bring an end to the Castro

The second issue is whether U.S. actions discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, or between the government and ordinary citizens. By their very nature, the new family sanctions do not discriminate. In fact they target the welfare of ordinary citizens, regardless of the fact that the focus of policymakers is the secondary economic impact on the Cuban government when fewer visits take place, and fewer gift parcels and
government. For the sake of argument, I'll stipulate that the cause is just.

cash remittances arrive. The clearest example is that of an elderly Cuban woman dependent on a Miami cousin to send money each
month to supplement her $4-per-month pension. The Miami cousin, whose loved one in Cuba is now too distant a relative under U.S. regulations, had to face a choice: stop the support or break U.S. law. The third issue, and the most critical in assessing U.S. policy, is whether the package of family sanctions has a prospect of success, on its own or as part of a larger "war" effort. In that they are part of a larger set of measures, all should be taken into account in this evaluation. That package includes three main measures that have the task, under both Commission reports, of "hastening" Castro's downfall: the sanctions themselves, aid to dissidents, and U.S. government broadcasts. It is a tough task; regardless of our disagreement with Cuba's form of government, its 47-year tenure indicates political stability. According to former CIA director Porter Goss last year, "Castro's hold on power remains firm." Sanctions. The Administration's policies assume that the ups and downs of the Cuban government's hard currency earnings affect its hold on power. For that reason, the Administration added the 2004 family sanctions and estimates that it is cutting Cuban hard currency earnings by $500 million per year. But meanwhile, the CIA estimates that Cuba's economy grew at a rate of eight percent last year, a $3 billion increase in economic output. Advances

in the tourism, mining, and energy industries, combined with credits and subsidies from Venezuela and China and relationships with other economic partners, are allowing Cuba to absorb, if not ignore, the impact of Washington's new sanctions. (The State Department's Cuba Transition Coordinator testified last month that Venezuela's support for Cuba approaches $2 billion annually.) Officials argue that U.S. sanctions drain resources that Cuban security agencies need for surveillance and repression of political dissidents -- but reports from Cuba indicate, if anything, that the repression is increasing. Opposition aid. Cuba's dissidents are valiant, and they have advanced important alternative public
policy ideas. The Varela Project, a pro-reform petition drive, moved the opposition from the realm of human rights monitoring and policy criticism to citizen participation. Yet by any measure, Cuba's opposition is not in an advanced state of development as a political movement. The signs that marked the growth in Eastern Europe's anti-communist opposition movements -- large public demonstrations, the co-opting of state and party institutions such as official labor unions -- are not present in Cuba. Cuba's opposition faces significant obstacles. Many Cubans, especially youth, are disaffected from politics of any stripe. Dissatisfied Cubans rarely think of joining an opposition group -- they concentrate on resolving immediate family needs, or they see emigration as a more promising solution. Moreover, Cubans know that dissident groups are infiltrated. In 2003, Havana unmasked twelve state security agents in the opposition's ranks; their stories were then told in detail in Cuban print and broadcast media. Aid

from the U.S. government or other outside sources does not seem to be the key variable affecting the movement's strength, and there is little basis to expect that the additional $46 million in taxpayer funds that have been promised over the next two years will make a difference.
Arguably, many forms of U.S. "support" -- especially those announced in public, in Miami, with fanfare -- do Cuba's dissidents more harm than good. The Cuban Democratic Directorate, a Miami organization that receives U.S. government funds, reports each year on the Cuban opposition's activities. Its latest report showed a 36 percent increase in the number of opposition actions between 2003 and 2004, from 1,328 to 1,805. However, the report described a decrease in the "intensity" of those actions because most -- 1,701, or 94 percent -- are vigils in homes on behalf of political prisoners, protests carried out by prisoners themselves, or similar activities. Meanwhile, acts of more direct confrontation with the government declined 74 percent between 2002 and 2004. Broadcasting. The 2004 commission report emphasized efforts to strengthen the signal of Radio and TV Marti, including purchase of an airplane fitted with transmitters, to overcome Cuban jamming. However, while Radio Marti's AM signal is jammed, its shortwave signal is not. In spite of the fact that many Cubans have shortwave radios, Radio Marti's weekly listenership stands at only 1.7 percent of the Cuban audience, according to a 2005 Administration estimate. Apart from jamming, Radio

Taken together, this trio of policies seems to have no prospect of being politically decisive in Cuba, hence no prospect of success according to the standards that Just War theory would apply. The political programs -- radio broadcasts and aid to
Marti's audience is clearly limited by program quality, according to reports from Cuba. dissidents -- increasingly seem to be an effort to ignite from the outside a movement that, in order to gain real political strength, requires indigenous sparks. There seems to be far more organized political opposition abroad than inside Cuba. The Bush Administration's Cuba family

sanctions have precisely the impact that Just War theory teaches states and statesmen to avoid: They harm innocents while leaving the king unscathed. The restrictions on visits and material assistance hurt the Cuban families who are their direct target -- but they are of little to no consequence to the Cuban government except as fodder for propaganda. The sanctions and other U.S. "transition" policies are highlighted all
around Cuba in billboards, articles, and broadcasts. In that the family sanctions are ineffective in achieving the Adminstration's goal, both on

they clearly fail to meet the standards in Just War theory that counsel against actions that cause human suffering with no prospect of ultimate political success. "We
their own and as part of a larger policy package, honor the warm family ties, the faith, the history, and the heritage that unite us all," President Bush said in a taped message to the Cuban people in May 2005. Through a change in course that eliminates his 2004 family sanctions, the President would better honor those family ties, his own family values, and the American interest in a policy toward Cuba that is both ethical and effective.

6. Ethical considerations come first in this instance because the embargo is justified under the
banner of human rights Mambi Watch 8 (Mambi Watch is an online news source committed to a demonstration of civility, respectable debate and forming sound
arguments on US/Cuba issues. Internally cites Michael Shermer, monthly columnist for Scientific American, Sanctions and Morals, http://mambiwatch.blogspot.com/2008/02/sanctions-and-morals.html)

one need only go one step further and consider the moral or ethical implications of a specific policy, namely economic sanctions. Joy Gordon from the Carnegie Council, a research institute whose mission is to "encourage and give
From this critical view, a voice to a variety of ethical approaches to the most challenging moral issues in world politics," in 1999 provided some strong arguments on the ethics and morals of economic sanctions, a subject she has written about extensively. Gordon argues: "Many

of those who defend sanctions do not argue that damage to innocents is morally acceptable, but rather that this damage is not inherent in sanctions and could in principle be mitigated or avoided altogether. Where measures are taken to minimize civilian harm, the argument goes, sanctions are ethically defensible. But this optimism is inconsistent with the nature of economic sanctions, as well as with the history of sanctions and the logic of the vested interests created by sanctions. If economic sanctions are motivated by an intent to do economic damage [such as the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and Helms-Burton of 1996], then partial sanctions and humanitarian exemptions [such as the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act of 2000] will allow the target nation [e.g. Cuba] to adjust its economy to minimize the overall damage, undermining the intentions of the political actors imposing the sanctions." "The more complete the sanctions , the more effective they will be, in terms of economic damage; but that in turn means that the economy as a whole will be undermined. The greater the degree to which the economy is generally undermined, the greater the damage to the civilian population, outside the military and political leadership... Sanctions that are economically effective necessarily entail the greatest harm to those who are the most vulnerable and the most disenfranchised from power." "To say that sanctions are ethical as long as we make sure to minimize civilian harm is to mask the fact that sanctions by their nature cause harm to civilians directly and primarily." Gordon, in another article, also addresses the morals of sanctions through Just War theory: "I do not deny that the contexts in which sanctions and sieges occur may be different, the intent of each may differ, the nature of the demands may be different, and the options of the besieged or sanctioned states may be different. But the moral objection to sanctions does not rest on the analogy; sanctions do not have to be identical to siege warfare in order to be subject to condemnation under just war principles. Indeed, if the intent of sanctions is peaceful rather than belligerent, then the usual justifications in warfare are unavailable. I am morally permitted to kill where my survival is at stake; and in war, I am morally permitted to kill even innocents, in some circumstances. But if one's goal is to see that international law is enforced or that human rights are respected, then the stakes and the justificatory context are quite different. It is hard to make sense of the claim that 'collateral damage' can be justified in the name of protecting human rights; or that international law might be enforced by means that stand in violation of international laws, including the just war principle of discrimination." These serious criticisms of economic sanctions have made their impact. Currently,
sanctioning institutions, like the UN, prefer "targeted sanctions" or "smart sanctions" that have more focus on travel and financial restrictions against targeted political leaders. Yet, this change in practice should not discourage any more serious criticism.

Contention two Latin American Neoliberalism

1. The Cuban embargo represents the violence of neoliberal globalization the US blockade is the
most coercive trade policy in existence

Harrison 2 (Faye V, professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, Global Apartheid, Foreign Policy, and Human Rights,
Summer 2002, Souls: Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 4(3): 48-68, http://web.clas.ufl.edu/users/fayeharr/images/Global.pdf)

structural adjustment is a specific policy of the IMF working in conjunction with the World Bank, USAID, and other to a general development orientation and policy climate driven by neoliberal assumptions about economic growth and change. In other words, structural adjustment can also serve as metonym for the restructuring and realignments that define present-day globalization.43 Hence, in the case of Cuba, although the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and USAID do not directly intervene in the Cuban economy, neoliberal policiesthe most coercive and punitive being the U.S. embargohave indeed reshaped the nation during its so-called Special Period since the end of USSR and Eastern bloc economic support, and they have undermined its revolutionary achievements in ensuring rights to employment, education, and health services. This has occurred even though, when the embargo began in the early 1960s, the politico-economic climate in the U.S. and the world was Keynesian rather than neoliberal. Nonetheless, for the past two decades, this punitive policy has been enforced within a politico-economic matrix of neoliberal globalization.
Although institutions, the term also refers

2. The 1AC is a call to stop trying to save Cuba the history of US intervention demonstrates that reform and democracy are a cover for economic imperialism
McGinley and Morley 8 (Morris and Chris, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, Cuba Too Big a Prize for Meddling US to Resist,
2/20, http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/20/7183)

the Cuban leadership have maintained their historic socialist commitments but with a pragmatic adaptation to the new global realities forced upon them by the collapse of the Soviet Union. This has meant a selective opening of the Cuban economy to market forces and the rejection of revolutionary adventurism in favour of a foreign policy based on appropriate state-tostate relations. While the authoritarian structures have not been dismantled - for which Castro bears a share of responsibility - the absence of political reform must be viewed in the context of a hostile and destabilising United States intent on reigning the island back into its sphere of influence. Left to its own devices, post-Castro Cuba would probably evolve into a social democracy - one of the few genuine social democracies in Latin America - intent on preserving its national independence and little more. It would, in other words, probably become for the first time in 50 years a non-issue in regional and global affairs. But the question is whether Cuba will be left to its own devices. Every US president since Eisenhower has sought to "win back" Cuba. George Bush is no exception. In his first comprehensive policy statement on Cuba, in May 2001, Bush set down the general administration line, declaring: "The policy of our government is not merely to isolate Castro, but to actively support those working to bring about democratic change in Cuba." In statements and policy guidelines since, the US has made clear that "democratic change" means nothing less than the total dismantling of the revolutionary state and what remains of its command (or welfare) economy. It is this, despite the rhetoric about electoral democracy, that is the fundamental objective of US policy.
Since the end of the Cold War Castro and

3. Latin American political transformations are ongoing and inevitable Cuba is a unique site of resistance to imperialism that spills over DAmato 7 (Paul, managing editor of the International Socialist Review, CUBA: Image and reality,
http://isreview.org/issues/51/cuba_image-reality.shtml) In this context, the

tasks of the Left in the U.S. are to oppose the embargo, resist any attempt on the part of the U.S. to impose its will on the island, and to support Cubas legitimate resistance to U.S.

domination. But working-class discontent is likely to grow in Cuba as a result of the way in which workers in Cuba have borne the brunt of the countrys economic devastation. To the extent that all resistance is denounced as Miami-inspired, and to the extent to which the Left in the U.S. accepts that logic, there will be no space for that resistance to combine opposition to exploitation at home with opposition to U.S. imperialism abroad. The enduring importance of the Cuban Revolutionand what infuriates the U.S. ruling class is that it stands as an example of successful resistance, against fearful odds, to U.S. imperialism. The message of the Cuban Revolution is that it is possible to defy Washington and win. The U.S. continues to embargo Cuba and paint it as a threat to U.S. interests not merely as payback to Bushs conservative Florida supporters, as a recent North American Congress on Latin America analysis notes. Washington is clearly concerned with Cubas regional relationship with Venezuela and other Latin American states, and its growing economic partnership with China. Daniel Fisk, National Security Adviser for the Western Hemisphere, clearly articulated the nature of the perceived threat. Ultimately, the threat is political, Fisk explains, because of Cuban and Venezuelan attempts to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its Caribbean partners. In effect, he is saying both endanger traditional U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere and are viewed as acting in tandem.74 That is why the defense of Cuba from U.S. meddling remains so important. Moreover, if Cuba goes the way of Eastern Europe (or China), the privatization is going to benefit a small number of former state bureaucrats and administrators, while Cubas poor and working class will lose the most important social achievements of the revolution, such as universal health care. These gains must be defended. Over the past several years, a new political period has opened up in Latin Americaa period of mass struggle as well as enormous political transformations in Venezuela, Bolivia, and elsewhere. In this developing context, the kind of politics that will emerge to guide these struggles is crucial to their success or failure. Stalinism (and neo-Stalinism) is a relic of the pasta distorted reflection of the failure of the Russian Revolution and of the substitution of ideas utterly alien to Marxism and the workers movement. The importance of this question is not only historical, i.e. about the ex-Stalinist states, but is about the kind of politics and movements that will emerge over the coming years. Those who look to minorities, or states, to bring social transformation are acknowledging that they dont really believe in the possibility of a revolutionary transformation from below, guided by the masses themselves. 4. Neoliberalism is reaching a structural crisis point only Latin American political movements can challenge the logic of global capitalism Robinson 12 (William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa
Barbara, Latin America in the New Global Capitalism, North American Congress on Latin America, https://nacla.org/article/latin-america-newglobal-capitalism)

By the early 21st century, neoliberalism appeared to be reaching its ideological and political limits. The political turning point came with the collapse of the Argentine economypreviously the poster child of neoliberalismand the subsequent mass uprising in 2001, which was followed throughout the region by a string of revolts among popular classes, an electoral comeback of the left, a new radical populism, the revival of a socialist agenda in Venezuela and elsewhere, and attempted coups and renewed U.S. interventionism. The left-oriented or pink tide governments challenged and even reversed major components of the neoliberal program. Many of them halted privatizations, nationalized natural resources and other economic sectors, restored public health and education, expanded social spending, introduced social welfare programs, renegotiated foreign debts on discounted terms, broke with the IMF, and staked out foreign policies independent of Washingtons dictates. Those countries that stuck to the neoliberal path have been hardest hit by the crisis unleashed by the 2008 collapse of the global financial system. In their respective articles, Ugarteche and Kozameh and Ray highlight that those countries that have pursued postneoliberal redistributive and regulatory policies, and limited re-nationalizations have fared much better, both with faster rates of economic growth and reductions in poverty and inequality. This process has been more advanced in South America than elsewhere in the region, where countries are also leading the push to develop alternative forms of cooperation and integration that break with political subordination to

Washingtons dictates. In their article in this issue, sociologist R.A. Dello Buono and author Ximena de la Barra discuss these regionalintegration efforts, most notably the recently founded Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). Clearly, the prospects for confronting the crisis of global capitalism must involve a deepening of these efforts. Far from over, the international financial crisis is likely to heat up in the coming period. The IMF and other international economic agencies predicted sluggish performance in the global economy over the next year and likely recurrences of financial crises. Most informed observers agree that we are in the midst of a deep structural crisis, that neoliberalism is reaching its material and ideological limits, and that we are entering a time of great turbulence, conflict, and uncertainty in the global system. Structural crises of world capitalism are historically times of sustained social upheaval and transformation, as reflected in Latin America in the rise of pink tide governments and the resurgence of mass grassroots movements from below. As veteran Uruguayan journalist Ral Zibechi discusses in this issue, these struggles are challenging not just the neoliberal model but the regions very relationship toif not participation inworld capitalism and the top-down models of elite domination, state authority, and decision making that remain in place, even in the pink tide countries. As Latin America becomes drawn ever deeper into the vortex of global turbulence, these struggles among distinct social and class forces over the nature and direction of change are sure to escalate. 5. The system of capital makes social exclusion on a global scale inevitable the utmost ethicopolitical responsibility is to reject this system of economic evaluation Zizek and Daly 2k4 (Slavoj and Glyn, Conversations with Zizek page 14-16) For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethicopolitical responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of todays global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture with all its pieties concerning multiculturalist etiquette Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called radically incorrect in the sense that it break with these types of positions 7 and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of todays social reality: the principles of global liberal
capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety.
For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffee, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizeks point is rather that in rejecting economism we

should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marxs central insight that in order to create a universal global system

the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose universalism fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the worlds populations. In this way, neoliberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism
does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded life-chances cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the developing world). And Zizeks point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalisms profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. Against this Zizek argues for a new

universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizeks universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a glitch in an otherwise sound matrix. 6. Latin America is a crucial site to contest global capitalism Robinson 12 (William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa
Barbara, Latin America in the New Global Capitalism, North American Congress on Latin America, https://nacla.org/article/latin-america-newglobal-capitalism) During the mid-1980s, I would travel from my home in Nicaragua to San Salvador, El Salvador, where I frequented the campus of the Central American University. At lunchtime we would exit the main campus gates to one of the citys principal thoroughfares, the Autopista Sur, dotted by rustic locally owned restaurants serving El Salvadors signature plate, pupusas. Today, there is not one pupusera outside the university gates. The skyline is instead blighted by an endless array of signs beckoning diners to all the well-known transnational fast food chains, from Burger King to Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken to Panda Express and Pollo Campero. This McDonaldization

or Warlmartizationthe globalization of what were once local and national retail sectorshas taken Latin America by storm. In the 10 years from 1990 to 2000, transnational supermarket and retail outlets increased their percentage of the Latin American retail market from 10% to 60%. By the 21st century, Walmart became Mexicos largest private employer, controlling over half of all supermarket sales. The new face of global capitalism is everywhere in Latin America, from the ubiquitous fast-food chains, malls, and superstores that dominate local markets in emerging megacities to vast new fields of soy run by transnational agribusiness, which has invaded the Southern Cone countryside; from sprawling tourist complexes that have displaced thousands of communities to the export processing zones (EPZs) that employ hundreds of thousands as low-wage workers for the global assembly line. Whole neighborhoods have been built with remittance wages sent by the tens of millions of Latin American emigrants who provide cheap itinerant labor for other regions in the global economy. New trading patterns now link Latin America commercially to every continent. An academic or journalist returning to research Latin Americas economy after several decades away would barely recognize the subcontinent, so vast has been the transformation of its political economy and social structure, as the region has been swept into capitalist globalization. Earlier research on the global economy focused on the phenomenon of runaway factories. The EPZs or maquiladoras, with their telltale exploitation of young women, became a premier symbol of capitalist globalization. Maquiladoras are now major components of
the Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean economies, and EPZs have spread as well to the Andean region and even into the Southern Cone. But the

Global Factory has since been joined by the Global Farm, as Latin Americas agriculture has become an extension of the new transnational agribusiness, and by the Global Supermarket, as retail sectors have
become globalized. As Brazilian economist Paulo Kliass discusses in this issue, Brazil has overtaken the United Kingdom to become the worlds sixth-largest economya powerful testament to the economic rise of Latin America in the Global South and the changing nature of the

Yet as capitalist globalization has unleashed a new cycle of modernization and accumulation in the region, it has had contradictory effects. It has transformed the old oligarchic class structures, generating new transnationally oriented elites and high-consumption middle classes that enjoy the fruits of the global economic cornucopia even as it has displaced tens of millions, aggravated poverty and inequality in many countries, and wreaked havoc on the environment. Those newly marginalized and dispossessed have been anything but passive, as several articles in this issue make clear. Social movements of all kinds have joined in mass grassroots struggles that have helped to push a number of governments to the left in recent years and are now challenging the whole paradigm of global capitalism.
international order.1