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Rogue Specters:Cuba and North Korea at theLimits of US Hegemony

Katherine Gordy and Jee Sun E. Lee*

The United States continues to label North Korea and Cubarogue states of unique international distinction even thoughtheir economic, political, and military power has declined steadilysince 1990. The authors argue that persistence of the label andaccompanying US behavior is best understood by expandingupon a Schmittian frame of analysis to demonstrate that the des-ignation of rogue state determines the normative weight givento certain behaviors, rather than the other way around. Examin-

ing the distinctive mode of politics practiced by North Koreaand Cuba shows that they do pose threats to the United States,but not in the ways traditionally recognized by liberal states.Rather, through the anomalous role they play in the US-led sys-tem, their relentlessly polemical political discourse, and theirexcitable speech and ideological unmasking, they highlight theprimacy of the political dimension determining their relation-ship with the United States and the contradictions underlyingthe universalism of US hegemony. KEYWORDS: North Korea, Cuba,

rogue states, US hegemony

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Cuba and North Korea have devotedmost of their resources to economic and political survival, hoping tointegrate into the capitalist world system and normalize relations withthe United States. Unlike transnational movements of radical politi-cal Islam such as al-Qaeda, which are gaining force globally, move-ments fuelled by Marxism-Leninism have little presence, particularlyon a global level. Cuba and North Korea now place more emphasis on

nationalism than Marxism-Leninism, although nationalism was always

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an essential ingredient of their revolutionary ideologies. Despite thisideological reorientation, the difficult living conditions in these coun-tries, and their unconventional, yet clear, overtures to the United States

for acceptance, the United States continues to name Cuba and NorthKorea as international rogues of distinction: They are portrayed asunrepentant, unredeemable, old-fashioned Marxist-Leninist stateswith one foot in the grave. For the majority of Democrats and Repub-licans alike, nothing short of a complete overhaul of Cuba and NorthKoreas existing systems will suffice.

Why? The conventional explanation suggests that, as relics of thepast and as states out of step with the progress of history, Cuba andNorth Korea are hazardous because their desperate autocrats are will-

ing to put the world and their own populations at risk to achieve theirmalevolent objectives or to hold onto their power: These countriesare ruled by reckless, outlaw, fiendish leaders untrammeled by inter-national norms and laws. Their weakness makes them not less men-acing, but more so; their irrationality makes them not just threats orenemies, but rogues.1

We argue that such an understanding obstructs complex analysesof these two countries and has had disabling effects on the ability todeal with them in a constructive fashion. Many have pointed to the ways

in which the United States uses assertions of rogueness indiscriminatelyand instrumentally. Yet we also argue here that an examination of thespecific charges brought up under the rogue state heading againstCuba and North Korea shows that the real threats from these countrieslie elsewhere. North Korea and Cuba do pose threats to the UnitedStates, but not in ways that have been identified within a contradiction-bedeviled postCold War US political discourse. A comparison of thetwo countries illuminates a particular style of politics that Cuba andNorth Korea share. This style of politics is highlighted both by the way

in which US political discourse and policy treat them and by their re-sponses to this treatment. What this examination will show is thatNorth Korea and Cuba are threats because, while the combination oftheir weakness and bravado appear to make them the ideal enemy, anyUS engagement with these two countries forces to the surface a polit-ical discussion about issues the United States wishes to claim a monop-oly on or declare irrelevant.

The CubaNorth Korea Pairing

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oppressors and successfully construct socialism and that no force iscapable of getting in the way of the people [los pueblos] marchingtowards socialism.2

Kim Il Sung, Indestructible Friendship andFraternal Solidarity between the Korean and Cuban People,

speech during a 1986 meeting of the masses in thecity of Pyongyang in homage to Comrade Fidel Castro, in a

book of speeches by Kim Il Sung published in Cuba

The commonalities between North Korea and Cuba do not beginand end with their rogue status. Both countries feel threatened by theUnited States. Since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba, only 90 miles from

Florida, has experienced the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, CIA-sponsored acts of sabotage and counterrevolution, and paramilitaryattacks launched from US territory. The United States has maintaineda naval base at Guantanamo Bay since 1903. The George W. Bush ad-ministrations Report to the Commission on a Free Cuba contains aclassified annex that Cuban officials and others suspect includesplans for a military invasion of the island. The Obama administrationhas taken a less harsh line by easing travel restrictions to Cuba forCuban Americans and expressing a willingness to talk with Raul Castro,

yet it supports and enforces the embargo and insists that the Cubangovernment must take a number of important steps, such as freeingpolitical prisoners and lowering remittance fees, before the UnitedStates will talk. At the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad in April2009, President Barack Obama declared: The Cuban people are notfree and thats our lodestone, our North Star, when it comes to ourpolicy in Cuba.3

Since its inception, North Korea (the Democratic Peoples Re-public of Korea, DPRK) has lived under the threat of a nuclear attack

from the United States: The threat was greatest during the KoreanWar, but exists to this day. One only need look at threats made by for-mer Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasizing US long-rangenuclear strike capacity to hit North Korea. The country also bears thescars of the Korean War. Far more napalm was dropped on NorthKorea than was dropped on Vietnam.4 US troops remain stationed atthe demilitarized zone and inside South Korea, and the United Statesis still technically at war with North Korea.

Both Cuba and North Korea insist that their socialism is a form

unique to that nations historical and cultural needs, rather than aMarxism-Leninism imported from abroad. Both countries claim to becarrying on anticolonial struggles that began in the nineteenth cen

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of the island, either directly through the military or indirectly througheconomic control, from 1902 up until the 1959 revolution. The DPRKtoo saw its struggle against Japanese occupation and its attempts to

unify the country interrupted by US military presence: Soon after thedefeat of Japan in World War II, the peninsula fractured into two sep-arate political systems that the Korean civil war only further crystal-lized and consolidated. North Korea and South Korea, each claimingto represent the true authentic Korean nation, have dealt with fierceantagonisms for over half a century. They have grown symbiotically,at times, providing mirror images of each other.

There are also differences between these two countries. Cuba doesnot conduct nuclear and missile tests. In spite of official anti-US

rhetoric, Cuba historically has had strong cultural and familial ties tothe United States. Freedom of speech and other civil liberties are notcurtailed and punished in Cuba to the extent that they are in NorthKorea. Cubans have not suffered the same level of deprivation thatNorth Koreans have experienced. Cuba has far more defenders in theUS and elsewhere than does North Korea. Finally, the strength of theCuban American National Foundation lobby and a large Cuban popu-lation in a swing state are key factors in explaining US policy towardCuba. However, the United States was suspicious of the revolution even

before Fidel Castros turn to socialism, and the Bush administrationspolicies were increasingly at odds with a more conciliatory approachsupported by many, even in the Cuban-American community in SouthFlorida.5 The Obama administration did not so much challenge thepower of the Cuban lobby as recognize its internal transformations.

Yet these striking similarities and differences are usually lost incharacterizations by the US government, press, and even at times inacademia, where the countries are readily reduced to one word:rogue.

Rogues and Rogue States

Rogueness as a category of states is neither well defined nor coherent.While used until the 1970s to describe dictatorships with undesirableor abhorrent domestic policies, it was most forcefully articulated in a1993 speech by Clintons then National Security Advisor AnthonyLake. In his From Containment to Enlargement speech, Lake ar-

gued that backlash or rogue states were states outside the newly ex-panded and triumphant circle of democracy and markets, whosel d h d b h b i id f d d

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and fail to abide by the rules and norms of the international system.To counter the presence and threat of rogue regimes, Lake recom-mended that the United States work within international norms and

institutions, but also strike back unilaterally, if necessary, for rogueregimes were those that exhibit a chronic inability to engage con-structively with the outside world.6

Lakes criteria seeped into the foreign policy of the Clinton andBush II administrations. However, there exists no consensus on theconcept. Robert Litwak points out that not only is rogueness a newcategory of states that has come into predominance in the postColdWar era, but it is an American political rubric without standing in in-ternational law and remains an American creation around which no

consensus exists among US allies. Drawing upon the observation thatrogueness is a political category employed by one or more greatpowers with a stake in the maintenance and orderly working of the in-ternational system, Litwak suggests that the rogue label designateswhat the United States, the most powerful state in the internationalsystem, wants it to designate: In the last instance, the rogue labelrefers to the demonization of a group of states according to politicallyselective criteria.7 Litwak argues that employing this political rubricsignificantly distorts US foreign policy making and accounts for its

systematic failure to produce its desired goal: regime change or dras-tic changes in behavior. However, what this otherwise informativetreatment fails to account for is why the rogue concept continues tobe useful despite producing such unsuccessful outcomes. There re-mains too much of an assumption of rationality of means and ends inUS foreign policy and an inability to locate the power of roguenessprecisely in its distortional taxonomy of states.

Authors like Paul Hoyt and Noam Chomsky have taken the argu-ment further, pointing to the use of the rogue concept by the United

States to pursue its own interests in a changed world of internationalrelations that has lost its raison dtre.8 The statements of US officialsand US policy toward the DPRK and Cuba show that the rogue cate-gory lacks analytic purchase and can be subject to abuse. Yet US state-ments and the exchanges between the United States on the one hand,and the DPRK and Cuba on the other, illustrate a particular kind of in-ternational political behavior that calls into question, albeit subtly, UShegemony, even as the situations of their own countries would seem todiscredit any of their claims about their own systems superiority.

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to the socialist system that they had supposedly either single-handedlyimposed, in the case of Castro, or perpetuated, in the case of Kim JongIl, who inherited the communist system from his father. US officials,

academics, and pundits use the metaphor of death in their analyses ofboth Cuba and North Korea, placing Kim Jong Il on a par with FidelCastro as the life force of a system that is only buying time before itspeople, released from fear, are free to adopt a capitalist liberal democ-ratic system. Events, including the February 2008 National Assembly ofPeoples Power election of Fidel Castros brother Raul as president ofCuba, have done little to challenge this popular metaphor.

Such awesome power is not attributed to figures such as OsamaBin Laden, mastermind of one of the most devastating attacks against

the United States, despite the inundation of images of his countenance(even on Wanted Dead or Alive posters). Radical Islam has been de-picted as the essence of evil, but the faces representing it are numer-ous. The argument goes that what makes Islamism dangerous is thatit is a many-headed hydraalways having another disillusioned andmisguided youth ready to fill the ranks of Islamist warriors. Whilethere are still shouts of victory when an important Islamist funda-mentalist is slain, there is a simultaneous recognition in US officialdiscourse that this is not enough. Not so with Cuba and North Korea,

regimes assumed to be so infirm that the slightest push will do themin.

Cuba and North Korea are weak. Cuba was hit hard by the disso-lution of the Soviet trading bloc (Council for Mutual Economic As-sistance or CMEA) in 1991. Cuba joined CMEA in 1972 and by the1980s, it was conducting 85 percent of its total (import-export) tradewith them.9 Between 1989 and 1992, total trade with member countriesof CMEA fell 93 percent.10 Between 1989 and 1993, Cuban nationaloutput fell by more than 50 percent.11 Through a variety of economic

reforms, the government survived the 1990s with certain achieve-ments of the revolution intact, but there is now increasing inequalityand poverty in a country that was previously strong egalitarian andprovided a decent standard of living to its citizens. Whereas in 1985poverty affected just above 6 percent of the population, it was affect-ing about 20 percent in 2002.12 Those without access to hard currency,either through tourism and select industries or through remittances,are at a distinct disadvantage.

North Koreas economy suffered even greater setbacks with the

withdrawal of Soviet aid and subsidized trade. Scholars such as NicholasEberstadt point to the growing crisis of the North Korea economy, slid-i f l d f i h i h 1970

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of 19951997, yet even this has been called little more than a guess-timate. Much uncertainty exists regarding the current status of theNorth Korean economy and the extent of its deterioration. What is cer-

tain is that the country continues to request and receive internationalaid and that its economy is struggling to produce or procure enoughfood and energy to provide the basic survival needs of its people.14

The weakened state of both economies, the decline of Marxism-Leninism as a global ideology, and the rise of transnational move-ments of radical political Islam have done little to alter US treatmentof Cuba and North Korea as threats. In 2004 The Miami Herald re-ported that the US Treasury Departments Office of Foreign AssetsControl had six times as many personnel devoted to tracking down vi-

olators of the US blockade of Cuba than they did to tracking downOsama Bin Laden.15

In 2007 Cuba and the DPRK appeared yet again on the US StateDepartments List of State Sponsors of Terror, defined as states thatprovide critical support to non-state terrorist groups and withoutwhose support terrorist groups would have greater difficulty obtain-ing the funds, weapons, materials, and secure areas they require toplan and conduct operations.16 During her 2005 confirmation hear-ings as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice named both states out-

posts of tyranny, arguing that they failed the town square test,whereby a person living in a particular country could walk into themiddle of the town square and express his or her views without fearof arrest, imprisonment and physical harm.17

Cuba and North Korea are not alone on the 2007 List of StateSponsors of Terror, which also included Iran, Sudan, and Syria. Ricealso named Iran, Zimbabwe, Burma, and Belarus outposts of tyranny.Cuba and North Korea share with many of these other countries a his-tory of socialism, third world nationalism, and anti-American rhetoric.

But while these other countries find themselves on and off such lists,North Korea and Cuba have been consistently characterized by theUnited States as grave threats to the stability of the world system eversince both countries were lost to Communism. If one uses Derridasdistinction between the rogue as adjective and rogue as noun, Cubaand North Korea are not simply accused of having rogue attributes,they are considered rogues by nature.18

Contemporary treatments of North Korea and Cuba tend to ig-nore history, attributing the current situation to maniacal leaders and

a brainwashed populace. Typical treatments can be found in variousforeign policy and international relations accounts of the DPRK andC b Th i i ib i f h l hi h


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more toward their political and economic transformation.19 One writersummarized the view of various policymakers and experts on NorthKorea as follows:

For much of the US foreign-policy establishment, North Korea wasa blank screen on which to project their own predispositions andprejudices. Those predispositions and prejudices were informed bythe widely shared image of North Korea as a rogue state, an im-placable and inimical outlaw with a master plan to deceive the worldand acquire nuclear weapons . . . To many, North Korea is the arch-etypal rogue state, and an old-fashioned communist one at that, mo-tivated to nuclear arms by paranoid hostility to the outside world. Itsone-man rule, internal regimentation, and dogmatism would alien-

ate any freedom-loving American.20

Such appears to have been the reaction of President George W.Bush to the DPRK leader, I loathe Kim Jong Il! . . . Ive got a visceralreaction to this guy.21While the former undersecretary for arms con-trol and international security, John Bolton, falsely informed an au-dience at the Heritage Foundation that the United States believesthat Cuba has at least a limited offensive biological warfare researchand development effort and that Cuba has provided dual-use

biotechnology to other rogue states, President Bush in his 2002 ad-dress described North Korea as a regime arming with missiles andweapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.22Accordingto Bush, North Korea, along with Iran and Iraq, constituted an axisof evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. Continuing thewar of words, in July of 2003, Bolton referred to Kim Jong Il as atyrannical dictator of a country where life is a hellish nightmarewhile in that same year then Secretary of State Colin Powell calledCuba an aberration in the West.23A year later, a report from the Com-

mission for Assistance to a Free Cuba concluded: The Castro regimecontinues to be a threat not only to its own people, but also to regionalstability, the consolidation of democracy and market economies in theWestern Hemisphere, and the people of the United States.24

While Cuba was not included in the original axis of evil, OttoReich concluded in a 2005 article entitled Latin Americas TerribleTwoFidel Castro and Hugo Chavez Constitute an Axis of Evil, thatit was from these two figures that the the real danger to regionalpeace and stability emanated.25As one historian aptly put it in 1999:

Much of US policy towards Cuba during the past forty years has beendriven by a determination to punish Cuba for the transgressions of

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much of it in the United States veers toward the punitive and etiolat-ing, tending to focus on whether or not the blockade is a useful pol-icy tool. The question animating much of this work is not whether the

Cuban government should be dismantled but rather when and how.Added to this inability or refusal to deal with current reality in

Cuba and North Korea is a voracious appetite for predicting andplanning for what will happen, as the journal Foreign Policy put it,when the Big Man goes down (referencing Fidel Castro and KimJong Il) or how these countries will transform themselves while tran-scending tragedies of the past (referring to these countries exper-iments with socialism).27 In these accounts, any consequences of thesocialist experiment should be erased and can easily be done so, be-

cause the people, in their hearts, never really wanted socialism in thefirst place.

Some contemporary treatments of these two countries endeavorto grasp the reality of daily life in Cuba and North Korea: They admita kind of fascination with the outcast countries, perhaps in sympathywith the revolutionary, socialist origins of the nations, but they alsoend up idealizing and exoticizing them. The Last Paradise: North Korea,a work of photo-surreal journalism, is introduced with a descriptionof the authors pilgrimage to the country, and their inability to grasp

the real North Korea. Comparing their experience to a visit to a re-mote museum:

The metaphor of a museum is doubly apt in North Koreas case, be-cause what a foreign visitor has a chance to observe is the last re-maining example of those once myriad Marxist-Leninist revolutionsthat once swept the globe, promising their downtrodden peoples asocialist paradise. Now, however, like the woolly mammoth or theflightless auk, these revolutions, too, have all but vanished into po-litical extinction.28

The last moments of North Korea have become an object to becaptured, the waning and the dying of the country to be preservedfor the future in flash frozen frames. The photographer embraces theall-encompassing mass fantasy of North Korea, and plunges himselfinto its vision of political system and ideology so as to highlight thepathological yearnings that the leaders of this brutal and failed statehave to maintain, a heroic and triumphant pose even as their mag-nificently mad revolutionary quest fails. The Last Paradise is worlds

removed from the concerns of policymakers or scholars of interna-tional relations. Nevertheless, there is a striking convergence towardd h i h d d f d di Th L P di


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the end of revolution. In the context of the global collapse of social-ism, what remains is the spectacle, the facade, the fetish, and the fan-tasy of North Korea: It is the stubborn insistence on maintaining the

semblance of this fanciful, virtual world of revolutionary accomplish-ment, where none exists in reality, that makes North Korea such aninteresting and important place to visit.29

Fascination with the ruins of socialism can also be seen in nu-merous photography books and journalistic accounts of 1990s Cuba.The books focus on crumbling buildings and vintage cars of Havanaand juxtapose images of socialist slogans to ones of material scarcityand inequality. The US economic blockade of Cuba and restrictionson travel and academic exchange help to maintain Cubas image as a

forbidden island. Yet Cubas geographic proximity to the UnitedStates, the continual arrival of Cubans from the island, and the rela-tively open nature of Cuban society has meant that information onCuba is far more available in the United States than information onNorth Korea. Finally, US restrictions do not affect the large numberof academics who work on Cuba and come from countries whose gov-ernments have much more friendly relations with the Cuban govern-ment. Few people of any nationality have been able to do substantialresearch in North Korea. Even within the US academy, Cuban studies

as a distinct discipline has evolved significantly since its inception inthe early 1960s. As one Cuban specialist wrote:

Continuous scholarship on Cuba for three decades has changed theinitial Manichaean vision of the Revolution, supplanting it by amore accurate vision and developing a minimum consensus on keyissues. . . . We may debate the rate of economic growth or degree ofdiversification of the Cuban economy, but few of us will totally rejectthe revolutionary accomplishments in health care, education, andsocial security or claim that Cuba is a Soviet puppet.30

In spite of the greater diversity and amount of information avail-able on Cuba, more refined academic accounts of either country gorelatively unheeded by those responsible for the dominant US dis-course on the two countries which, on the one hand, characterizesCuba and North Korea as threats to their own people, to the UnitedStates, and to global and regional stability and as countries that the USgovernment must focus on overhauling and, on the other hand, char-acterizes the two countries as economically, politically, and histori-

cally doomed, their cautious, erratic, and government-controlledeconomic reforms only serving to forestall their inevitable collapse.

Th di i i US di i l N h K d C b

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economic and political systems are completely unacceptable. Thissame discourse, however, consigns them to the dustbin of history,characterizing their systems as archaic, retrograde, in the final stages

of decay, and as the last holdouts against the global tide of liberal,free-market democratization. In this discourse these threatening roguestates are held together only by the presence of one or two powerfulindividuals whose death or downfall will lead to the dissolution of theentire system.31 Of course, weak states, precisely because they are un-stable, can be considered threats if accompanied by other conditions.The DPRK and Cuba have been designated as rogue regimes by theUnited States primarily based upon four criteria: They pose a militarythreat to regional and/or global stability; they seek to acquire or de-

velop weapons of mass destruction; they sponsor or support terrorism;and they challenge and flout international norms and laws, failing toplay by the rules of the system.

If we rely upon the US governments own assessment that Cubasconventional military, personnel, expenditures, and activities havebeen significantly reduced since the loss of Soviet subsidies, the firsttwo do not apply to Cuba.32 North Korea fulfills all four criteria tovarying degrees, and in particular in reference to its nuclear weaponsambitions.33 Cuba and North Korea are both designated as state spon-

sors of terror by the US State Department based upon their supposedlinks to terrorist organizations and primarily on their unwillingness toactively participate in the US-led War on Terror.34

Because these two states engage in these activities in varying de-grees, they merit such treatment and categorization as rogue. We argue,however, that this is to see things from the wrong end of the telescope,and that a closer examination will demonstrate the way that the politi-cal determines the specific normative weight given to their behavior.

The Primacy of the Political

Cuba and North Korea are treated as dangerous by the United States,not because of one specific element of their behavior but rather be-cause of a combination of discourse and modes of interaction, whichare provoked by the United States, but are also products of the par-ticular histories and ideological positionings of these two countries.To put it another way, it is not possible to understand the nature of

the threat posed by these two states unless we reverse the order ofdetermination and reduce things to their most fundamental level.P li i l i d i C l S h i d l i l b


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ethical, economic, or religiouscan transmogrify into political ones,the political cannot be reduced to them. Moreover, the political doesnot reside in the battle itself . . . but in the mode of behavior which

is determined by this possibility.35 Against the background of thefriend-enemy distinctionthe flouting of international norms, theprojected possession of nuclear weapons, or the sponsoring of terror-ism, and so onthe differences between the United States and thesetwo states gain coherence, they assume meaning. The rogue concept,no matter how inconsistent or arbitrary its usage, becomes compre-hensible in this context of decisionism. It is because they exist as ene-mies that the different aspects of rogue behavior matter in the waythey do: One political community pitted against another political com-

munity. As one scholar put it, Schmitt held that political conflicts overinterests transform the very content of these interests, as they arepolemically formulated and reformulated in struggle with an enemywhose own interests come to be seen as the negation of ones own.36

Another point can be brought to bear here: Schmitts critique ofliberalisms neutralization and evasion of politics. Liberalisms un-easiness with the naked brutality underlying politics, its translation ofthe political into the culturally neutral (not the rule of force andpower but the rule of law), the operation of the market, and the uni-

versality of morals, means that liberal states are more willing to evadethe political even as they engage in politics at its most basic level.

Cuba and North Korea in the role of US enemy attempt to re-move this liberal smoke screen37 and assert the primacy of the po-litical distinction, the possibility of war that has determined much oftheir mode of behavior for over half a century. North Korea and Cubalive, as it were, the friend-enemy distinction. Their excitable speechnot only makes it easy for the United States to treat them as threats,but also speaks to the polemical relationship-struggle with the enemy.

There is here no simple conflict of interests as such. Cuba and NorthKorea fire back long-winded responses, fierce retorts, acute recrimi-nations, and plain smack-downs in the face of the most powerful statein the world. To give a few examples: At a news conference in 2005,the Foreign Ministry spokesman for North Korea announced thatthen President Bush was a half-baked man in terms of morality anda philistine whom we can never deal with and that Bush was theworlds dictator who has turned the world into a sea of blood.38 In2003 John Bolton described Kim Jong Il as a tyrannical dictator of

a country where life is a hellish nightmare; North Korea respondedin kind, saying that such human scum and bloodsucker is not entitled

k i h lk A l i f 1997 N h K

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The question of easing the tension and removing the danger of warin our country can be settled, before all else, when the United Statesgives up its hostile policy against our Republic and a peace treaty isconcluded between the DPRK and the United States. . . . Althoughthe United States clamors about the end of the cold war and eas-ing of the tension, she is invariably resorting to the power poli-tics, threatening us with ceaseless military exercises and aggressivemaneuvers. . . . Trying to bring us to our knees by military threat orpressure is a foolish attempt and a dangerous act.39

Another instance of excitable speech is Cubas retort to the UnitedStates in 2004 when the US Interests Section in Havana decorated itsbuilding with Christmas lights, Santa Claus, and a giant 75 in recog-

nition of the political prisoners jailed following a 2003 crackdown.40After the United States refused the Cuban governments request to re-move the decorations and sign, the Cuban government posted enor-mous photos of scenes of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib and US soldierspointing guns at children along with signs reading fascists and madein the USA stamped over a swastika on billboards across the street.One countrys human rights abuses do not absolve those of another, yetthe exchange served to diminish the clear distinction the United Stateswishes to make between itself and others.

Additionally, Fidel Castro entered the public arena again in 2007with two reflections published in the party paper Granma. The first,titled More than Three Billion People in the World Condemned toPremature Death from Hunger and Thirst, criticized Bush for advo-cating the diversion of food from the mouths of the hungry in the de-veloping world to the production of ethanol as an alternative fuelsource in the United States. In his second reflection, The Interna-tionalization of Genocide, Castro chastised Bush for failing to takeinto account the environmental and social costs of increased corn

production in developing nations and for ignoring the importance ofenergy-efficiency measures.41 He ended with an expression of con-cern about possible wars for oil and the US search for a pretext to in-vade Iran. I am not exaggerating or using untempered words,concluded Castro. I am going by the facts. As can be seen, the poly-hedron [the United States] has many dark sides.

The same month, as the Six-Party Talks on North Koreas nuclearweapons program stalled over the issue of frozen assets, a statementon the North Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) website also ac-

cused the United States of warmongering:


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ment and throw the whole of the Korean Peninsula into the vortex ofa nuclear war. The anti-DPRK war exercises of the US and South Ko-rean warmongers seriously threaten the process of peace and recon-ciliation on the Korean Peninsula. The Korean nation and the worldpeace-loving people will never tolerate these developments.42

North Korea and Cuba have spurned the catholic embrace of US-led globalization. In their rejection, they recall not only their historiesbut also the sober political realities of a machtpolitik, real and imag-ined, undergirding US universalism.

Yet these enemies are not as ideal as they first appear, becausetheir tough talk does not simply represent a rejection of all that theUnited States claims to stand for. Instead, they simultaneously useand defy US categories. They challenge the United States on its ownterms, arguing it is they who are truly bringing freedom, democracy,and general well being to their people. It is they who are the great de-fenders of human rights, defined as the right to food, housing, andmedicine. Until the 1990s, there was some basis to these claims.43 Un-like Islam, which can more be easily dismissed as the Other, thesecountries appeal to a Western tradition, socialism, and yet, they arguethat they are improving and transforming it. By virtue of their exis-tence, these countries call into question those elements of Marxism-Leninism that they share with their bourgeois counterpartsideas ofhistory of progress, of the proper stages of revolution, of what it meansto be a nation.

Schmitt warned that when liberal states tried to do away with thefriend-enemy distinction by claiming to represent the interests of hu-manity, they adopted a universal concept for their own particularends, identifying themselves with humanity so as to exclude theenemy. Thus only by suggesting that the enemy was beyond the palecould a claim to universality be maintained.44 Drawing on Schmittswork, Geoffrey Hawthorn argues that this tension has confronted lib-eralism with acute force since the end of the Cold War. The paradoxof liberal hegemony . . . is that it is weak because it cannot convincinglybe demonstrated, and in so far as it can be, threatens to underminethe principles on which it is.45 North Korea and Cuba expose thisparadox: When they talk back to the United States, they do so not justin the sense of refusing to comply with its commands and directives,but in their peculiarly styled, adamant insistence they are doing thingsright, in their own way. Part of the talking back, however acrid or vit-riolic, is a way of continuing the dialogue, and it is partly through di-alogue that they hope to be able to establish normal relations with the

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The excitable speech of the two countries also serves to highlighta political rhetoric that functions in the United States, just as in Cubaand North Korea. Critics of the Cuban government, including US Con-

gress members seeking to end the blockade, have long argued that theblockade has empowered Castro, allowing him to lay the blame forCubas problems elsewhere while rallying people behind him.47 Ourpoint, however, is that what is threatening to the United States is notonly the specific criticism leveled at it by Cuba or North Korea, but alsothe way that excitable speech operates to unmask the fundamentallyideological nature of any political discourse (be it communist, capital-ist, etc.) that the United States wishes to evade and obscure in the nameof universalistic values. The primary challenge is not to any particular

universal value, but rather to the US claim to represent it. This un-masking does not close down discussion but rather brings issues backto the realm of the political, challenging the dichotomy of human rightsversus tyranny that US discourse sets up to silence those with whom itdoes not agree. The dialogical nature of the relationship, however con-torted or strained it may be at any given time, demonstrates how bothstates seem to lie outside the range of US power beyond the parame-ters of force and consent. They cannot be totally bought off or silencedthrough the various means available to US hegemony.

Ruins of Socialism

North Korea and Cuba continue to exercise the fullest of their rhetor-ical powers in responding to and at times harassing the United States,but there is another dimension to their challenge. We would like totake off from Derridas Specters of Marx(based upon his lectures from1993, the same year as Lakes foreign policy pronouncements). Der-

rida commences with lines from Hamlet, in the presence of the spiritof the father, and from the Communist Manifesto, A specter is haunt-ing Europethe specter of communism. This, for Derrida, is aspecter to come, and the haunting it accomplishes is historical butnot dated: It does not proceed according to calendrical time. Derridaelaborates upon the particular disjuncture informing his analysis:

I was initially thinking of all the forms of a certain haunting obses-sion that seems to me to organize the dominant influence today. At

a time when a new world disorder is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid it-self of all of Marxs ghosts Hegemony still organizes the repression


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In both cases, of the specter invoked by Marx in 19471948, thespecter haunting the decrepit allies of Europe of a communism tocome, and of the specter of our century, capitalism has not killed off

the specter. Derrida writes:

Today, almost a century and a half later, there are many who through-out the world, seem just as worried by the specter of communism, justas convinced that what one is dealing with there is only a specterwithout body, without present reality, without actuality or affectivity,but this time, it is supposed to be a past specter. It was only a specter,an illusion, a phantasm, or a ghost: that is what one hears everywheretoday. . . . A still worried sigh of relief: let us make sure that in the fu-ture it does not come back! At bottom, the specter is the future, it is

always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come orcome back; in the future, said the powers of old Europe in the lastcentury, it must not incarnate itself, either publicly or in secret. Inthe future, we hear everywhere today, it must not re-incarnate itself;it must not be allowed to come back since it is past.49

As it is already past, it must not be allowed to come back, and thus,the injunction, the chasing away of the specter which is in part effectedvia exorcism, and in part, via a performative that seeks to reassure but

first of all to reassure itself by assuring itself, for nothing is less sure,that what one would like to see dead is indeed dead.50 Communismis dead. Marxism is dead. Long live capitalism! Indeed, the an-nouncement of the death of communism is performative, but shouldit have to be shouted or whispered? To shout it would be to call at-tention to communisms latent potency, to its onetime status as con-tender on the global scene and a source of continuing critique. Towhisper it would be to display uncertainty about its demise or to missthe chance to claim responsibility for its passing. It is not sufficient

that Cuba and North Korea are struggling. The United States wantsto be responsible for their disappearance. Anything less is a failure,for not only are North Korea and Cuba supposed to be dead, but theynever should have existed in the first place. In Korea, US militarymight was supposed to take care of this country overnight. MacArthursaid he could handle North Korea with one hand tied behind [his]back.51 Commanders could not believe that they had such a formida-ble enemy during the war. In Cuba, both the 1959 triumph of the pop-ular movement that overthrew Fulgencio Batista and Castros later

turn to communism were terrible shocks to the American people andgovernment. Communist revolution was not supposed to happen inC b A i i d C b i h i d f C b

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easy narrative of an inexorable global move toward liberal marketdemocracies. Unlike other one-party Communist-run states such asChina and Vietnam, Cuba and North Korea have not overseen dra-

matic economic restructuring and a clear embrace of a market econ-omy: Instead they have approached market reform with greatcaution. Their transformations are distinct, not only because the gov-ernment controls them to a large extent, but also because they are in-fluenced by over forty years of revolution and socialism that narrowthe parameters of what these governments can do to maintain power.For instance, in Cuba, it is not simply the government that insists onpreserving what it calls the achievements of the revolution, fromfree health care and education to low infant mortality rates. Most dis-

sidents and Cubans outside official government structures also sup-port the maintenance of the welfare state in Cuba. This is a challengeto the United States, where the already limited welfare state is beingincreasingly dismantled, but it is also to the Cuban government,which wrongly believes itself the only protector of socialism. In thissense, the governments of North Korea and Cuba are beholden tothe legacies of socialism even as they have fallen far short of thepromises made to their people. That Cubans and North Koreans havesuffered at the hands of their own governments is not in question.

However, the focus on their victimization too often comes at the ex-pense of taking seriously the voices of those living in these two coun-tries. For the United States to do so, however, would be to give upimportant ground for it would mean recognizing that the failures ofNorth Korea and Cuba to live up to their own goals or to respond tothe desires of their inhabitants do not signal the clear triumph of lib-eral capitalism.

North Korea and Cuba occupy an important position in the US-led global capitalist system. They annoy, harass, threaten, hound, and,

dare it be said, haunt the United States. North Korea and Cuba arealready supposed to be dead; their deaths have already been pre-dicted and their resurrection in another body already plotted andgraphed; epitaphs are ready. As rickety old ghosts in the system, therusty-sickled specters of a socialism that refuses to finally lie down anddie, North Korea and Cuba should already be dead, and yet they con-tinue to play the role of the specter.

Notes

The authors would like to thank Aaron Belkin, Bill Gordy, Dean Hammer,


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2. Authors translation. Kim Il Sung, Por la victoria total del socialismo(Ha-vana: Editora Poltica, 1992) pp. 7071.

3. Frances Robles, President Barack Obama tells Cubas Raul Castro:Its Your Move Now, The Miami Herald, April 19, 2009. Available at: http://

www.miamiherald.com/1370/story/1007902.html4. Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country(New York: Free Press,

2004) p. 16.5. See, for instance, the results of a 2007 poll of 1000 randomly selected

Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County in which 65 percent of respondentssupported dialogue with the Cuban government (http://www.fiu.edu/~por/Cuba8/pollresults.html). For a discussion of the diversity of the Cuban Amer-ican community, see Maria Cristina Garcia, Havana USA: Cuban Exiles andCuban Americans in South Florida, 19591994(Berkeley: University of Califor-nia Press, 1996).

6. Anthony Lake, From Containment to Enlargement, speech given atJohns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Wash-ington, DC, 1993.

7. Robert Litwak, Rogue States and US Foreign Policy: Containment After theCold War(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000) pp. xiv, 3, 47.

8. Paul Hoyt, The Rogue State Image in American Foreign Policy,Global Society, 14, no. 2 (2000): 306; Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule ofForce in World Affairs(Cambridge: South End Press, 2000).

9. Miguel Garca Reyes and Mara Guadalupe Lopez de Llergo yCornejo, Cuba despus de la era sovitica(Mexico City: Colegio de Mexico, 1997)p. 25.

10. Frank T. Fitzgerald, The Cuban Revolution in Crisis: From Managing So-cialism to Managing Crisis(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994) p. 2.11. Manuel Pastor, Jr., and Andrew Zimbalist, Cubas Economic Conun-

drum, NACLA Report on the Americas(Sept./Oct. 1995): 8.12. Jorge I. Domnguez, The Cuban Economy at the Start of the Twenty-

First Century: An Introductory Analysis, in Jorge I. Domnguez, Omar Eve-leny Prez Villanueva, and Lorena Barberia, eds., The Cuban Economy at theStart of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University DavidRockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2004), p. 5.

13. Indicative of the dimensions of that decline are North Koreas tradetrends: between 1990 and 1998, according to reports by its trading partners,

the DPRKs international purchases and sales of merchandise had fallen bymore than half. Nicholas Eberstadt, The End of North Korea(Washington, DC:AIE Press, 1999), pp. 78.

14. Marcus Noland, Between Collapse and Revival: A Reinterpretationof the North Korean Economy, paper presented at the conference on Eco-nomic Development in North Korea and Global Partnership, South Korea,March 2001.

15. Nancy San Martin, US Treasury OFAC Has 6 Times More Personnelon Cuba than Bin Laden, Miami Herald, May 1, 2004, available at http://havanajournal.com/politics/entry/us_treasury_ofac_has_6_times_more_personnel_on_cuba_than _bin_laden/

16. US Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism 2007, avail-able at http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2007/index.htm. State Sponsors ofTerrorism Overview available at http://www state gov/s/ct/rls/crt/2007/103711

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18. Jacques Derrida, The Last of the Rogue States: The Democracy toCome, Opening in Two Turns, South Atlantic Quarterly103, no. 2/3 (Spring/Summer 2004): 324325.

19. For a recent more nuanced example of the genre, see Andrei

Lankovs memo, The FP Memo: How to Topple Kim Jong Il,Foreign Policy(March/April 2007).

20. Leon Sigal, Rogue Concepts, Harvard International Review2, no. 2(2000): 12.

21. Bob Woodward, Bush at War(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002)p. 340.

22. Gorge W. Bush, State of the Union Address,Available at www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002.

23. Christopher Marquis, Powell, Denouncing Crackdown, Calls CubaAberration in the West, New York Times, 29 April 2003.

24. Bureau of Western Hemispheric Affairs, Commission for Assistance to aFree Cuba(Washington, DC: US Department of State, 2004).

25. Otto J. Reich, Latin Americas Terrible TwoFidel Castro andHugo Chavez Constitute an Axis of Evil, National Review(11 April 2005): 34.

26. Louis Prez Jr., Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of USPolicy towards Cuba,Journal of Latin American Studies34, no. 2 (2002): 227.

27. The Day After,Foreign Policy (Nov./Dec. 2003,): 32.28. Nicolas Righetti, The Last Paradise: North Korea(New York: Umbrage,

2003).29. Ibid.30. Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Three Decades of Studies on the Cuban Revo-

lution: Progress, Problems, and the Future, in Damian Fernndez, ed.,CubanStudies since the Revolution(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992) p. 25.31. The issue of succession is important, but discussions of transitions are

often part of the pathologization of these countries and represent an unwill-ingness to recognize that changes have already begun and that the legacy ofthe systems cannot be reduced to the figures of Fidel Castro and Kim Jong Il.

32. See Defense Intelligence Agency, The Cuban Threat to U.S. NationalSecurity(1997 [cited July 5, 2005]), available from www.defenselink.mil.pubs/cubarpt.htm; US Department of State, Background Note: Cuba, available athttp://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2886.htm

33. For a discussion of North Koreas nuclear capabilities, see, for exam-

ple, V. Cha and D. Kang, Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Selig Harrison, The SecondBush Administration and the Korean Peninsula, 30 March1 April 2005; SeligHarrison, Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

34. See US Dept. of State, Country Report on Terrorism, note 16.35. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1996) p. 37.36. Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt

(London: Verso, 2002) p. 106.37. Leo Strauss, Notes on Carl Schmitt, in Schmitt,The Concept of the Po-

litical, note 35, p. 84.38. Washington Post,April 28, 2005.39 Kim Jong Il Let Us Carry Out President Kim Il Sungs Instructions


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About Cuban Government Threats to Holiday Lights and Decorations, avail-able at www.state.gov/p/wha/rls/rm/39815.htm

41. Fidel Castro, The Internationalization of Genocide. Available athttp://www.granma.cu/INGLES/abril/mier4/14refexf.html; More than Three

Billion People in the World Condemned to Premature Death from Hungerand Thirst. Available at http://www.granma.cu/INGLES/2007/marzo/juev29/14reflex.html

42. Joint Military Exercises Reveal Anti-DPRK Policy, Available at http://www.kcna.co.jp/index-e.html

43. See Jim Lobe, Learn from Cuba, Says World Bank, InterPress NewsService, 30 April 2001 and Cumings, North Korea, note 4, p. ix. Cuba still per-forms fairly well according to these indicators.

44. When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity, it isnot a war for the sake of humanity, but a war wherein a particular state seeksto usurp a universal concept against its military opponent. At the expense ofits opponent, it tries to identify itself with humanity in the same way as onecan misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these asones own and to deny the same to the enemy. Schmitt, The Concept of the Po-litical, note 35, p. 54.

45. Geoffrey Hawthorne, Liberalism since the Cold War: An Enemy toItself, Review of International Studies25 (1999): 145160, at 160.

46. For recent papers on normalization of relations between North Koreaand other states see: http://www.uskoreainstitute.org/research/publications/wps/index.htm.

47. For instance, see Representative Jeff Flakes comments in Will U.S.

Trade with Cuba Promote Freedom or Subsidize Tyranny? Featuring Rep.Jeff Flake, R. Arizona; Philip Peters, Lexington Institute; and Dennis K. Hays,Cuban American National Foundation, paper presented at the Cato Insti-tute Policy Forum, The Cato Institute, F. A. Hayek Auditorium, WashingtonDC, 25 July 2002.

48. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work ofMourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge,1994), pp. 4, 47.

49. Ibid., p. 39.50. Ibid., p. 48.51. Cited in Cumings, North Korea, note 4, pp. 89.

52. Prez Jr., Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro, note 26, p. 231.

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