The embargo is racist and imperialist our negative state action is wholly consistent

with the combating racism

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/Imagi-
nations_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 world.9 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.

This violence is a disadvantage to the alternative rejecting the state means we can
never talk about US domination abroad or racist nature of US foreign policy only the
plan can solve racism none of their evi assumes the Cuban model which is totally
unique
This violence has a material impact afro-Cuban women are rendered disposable under the
US embargo
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 propia in 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 privileges including 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

Predictions are good and inevitable
Kurasawa4
(Professor of Sociology, York University of Toronto, Fuyuki, Constellations Volume 11, No 4, 2004). SAS
Independently of this contractualist justification, global civil society actors are putting forth a number of arguments
countering temporal myopia on rational grounds. They make the case that no generation, and no part of
the world, is immune from catastrophe. Complacency and parochialism are deeply flawed in that even if we earn a temporary
reprieve, our children and grandchildren will likely not be so fortunate unless steps are taken today. Similarly, though it might be possible to
minimize or contain the risks and harms of actions to faraway places over the short-term, parrying the eventual blowback or spillover effect is
improbable. In fact, as I argued in the previous section, all but the smallest and most isolated of crises are rapidly
becoming globalized due to the existence of transnational circuits of ideas, images, people, and commodities. Regardless of
where they live, our descendants will increasingly be subjected to the impact of environmental
degradation, the spread of epidemics, gross North-South socioeconomic inequalities, refugee flows, civil
wars, and genocides. What may have previously appeared to be temporally and spatially remote risks
are coming home to roost in ever faster cycles. In a word, then, procrastination makes little sense for
three principal reasons: it exponentially raises the costs of eventual future action; it reduces preventive
options; and it erodes their effectiveness. With the foreclosing of long-range alternatives, later generations may be left with a
single course of action, namely, that of merely reacting to large-scale emergencies as they arise. We need only think of how it gradually
becomes more difficult to control climate change, let alone reverse it, or to halt mass atrocities once they are underway. Preventive foresight is
grounded in the opposite logic, whereby the decision to work through perils today greatly enhances both the
subsequent room for maneuver and the chances of success. Humanitarian, environmental, and techno-
scientific activists have convincingly shown that we cannot afford not to engage in preventive labor.
Moreover, I would contend that farsighted cosmopolitanism is not as remote or idealistic a prospect as it appears to some, for as Falk writes,
[g]lobal justice between temporal communities, however, actually seems to be increasing, as evidenced by various expressions of greater
sensitivity to past injustices and future dangers.36 Global civil society may well be helping a new generational self-conception take root,
according to which we view ourselves as the provisional caretakers of our planetary commons. Out of our sense of responsibility for the well-
being of those who will follow us, we come to be more concerned about the here and now.
Political responsibility requires a consideration of consequences
Jeffrey Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for the Study of
Democracy and Public Life at Indiana University, Bloomington, Spring 2002, Dissent, vol. 49, no. 2
As writers such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an unyielding
concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may be morally laudable, reflecting a kind
of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not
ensure the achievement of what one intends. Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally
compromised parties may seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as
serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that in a world of real
violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it is often a form of complicity in injustice.
This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In
categorically repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect; and (3) it fails to
see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about intentions; it is the effects of action, rather
than the motives of action, that is most significant. Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often
the pursuit of "good" that generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that
one's goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing these goals and
to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways. Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It
alienates those who are not true believers. It promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness. WHAT
WOULD IT mean for the American left right now to take seriously the centrality of means in politics? First, it would mean taking seriously the specific means
employed by the September 11 attackers--terrorism. There is a tendency in some quarters of the left to assimilate the death and destruction of September 11 to
more ordinary (and still deplorable) injustices of the world system--the starvation of children in Africa, or the repression of peasants in Mexico, or the continued
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. But this assimilation is only possible by ignoring the specific modalities of September 11. It is true that in
Mexico, Palestine, and elsewhere, too many innocent people suffer, and that is wrong. It may even be true that the experience of suffering is equally terrible in
each case. But neither the Mexican nor the Israeli government has ever hijacked civilian airliners and deliberately flown them into crowded office buildings in
the middle of cities where innocent civilians work and live, with the intention of killing thousands of people. Al-Qaeda did precisely this. That does not make the
other injustices unimportant. It simply makes them different. It makes the September 11 hijackings distinctive, in their defining and malevolent purpose--to kill
people and to create terror and havoc. This was not an ordinary injustice. It was an extraordinary injustice. The premise of terrorism is the sheer superfluousness
of human life. This premise is inconsistent with civilized living anywhere. It threatens people of every race and class, every ethnicity and religion. Because it
threatens everyone, and threatens values central to any decent conception of a good society, it must be fought. And it must be fought in a way commensurate with
its malevolence. Ordinary injustice can be remedied. Terrorism can only be stopped. Second, it would mean frankly acknowledging something well understood,
often too eagerly embraced, by the twentieth century Marxist left--that it is often politically necessary to employ morally troubling means in the name of morally
valid ends. A just or even a better society can only be realized in and through political practice; in our complex and bloody world, it will sometimes be necessary
to respond to barbarous tyrants or criminals, with whom moral suasion won't work. In such situations our choice is not between the wrong that confronts us and
our ideal vision of a world beyond wrong. It is between the wrong that confronts us and the means--perhaps the dangerous means--we have to employ in order to
oppose it. In such situations there is a danger that "realism" can become a rationale for the Machiavellian worship of power. But equally great is the danger of a
righteousness that translates, in effect, into a refusal to act in the face of wrong. What is one to do? Proceed with caution. Avoid casting oneself as the incarnation
of pure goodness locked in a Manichean struggle with evil. Be wary of violence. Look for alternative means when they are available, and support the
development of such means when they are not. And never sacrifice democratic freedoms and open debate. Above all, ask the hard questions about the situation at
hand, the means available, and the likely effectiveness of different strategies. Most striking about the campus left's response to September 11 was its refusal to
ask these questions. Its appeals to "international law" were naive. It exaggerated the likely negative consequences of a military response, but failed to consider
the consequences of failing to act decisively against terrorism. In the best of all imaginable worlds, it might be possible to defeat al-Qaeda without using force
and without dealing with corrupt regimes and political forces like the Northern Alliance. But in this world it is not possible. And this, alas, is the only world that
exists. To be politically responsible is to engage this world and to consider the choices that it presents. To refuse to do
this is to evade responsibility. Such a stance may indicate a sincere refusal of unsavory choices. But it should never be
mistaken for a serious political commitment.

Extinction rhetoric is good key to survival
Matheny 7
[Jason, Department of Health Policy and Management, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University. Reducing the Risk of
Human Extinction. Risk Analysis. Vol 27, No 5, 2007, http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website/resources/publications/2007_orig-
articles/2007-10-15-reducingrisk.html]
9. Conclusion We may be poorly equipped to recognize or plan for extinction risks (Yudkowsky, 2007). We may
not be good at grasping the significance of very large numbers (catastrophic outcomes) or very small
numbers (probabilities) over large timeframes. We struggle with estimating the probabilities of rare or
unprecedented events (Kunreuther et al., 2001). Policymakers may not plan far beyond current political
administrations and rarely do risk assessments value the existence of future generations.18 We may
unjustifiably discount the value of future lives. Finally, extinction risks are market failures where an individual enjoys no
perceptible benefit from his or her investment in risk reduction. Human survival may thus be a good requiring deliberate
policies to protect. It might be feared that consideration of extinction risks would lead to a reductio ad absurdum: we ought to invest all
our resources in asteroid defense or nuclear disarmament, instead of AIDS, pollution, world hunger, or other problems we face today. On the
contrary, programs that create a healthy and content global population are likely to reduce the probability
of global war or catastrophic terrorism. They should thus be seen as an essential part of a portfolio of
risk-reducing projects.