The “Invasion” Case
Yes, CBU ran (and may still run) what is essentially a “make Cuba the 51st state case”. We seemed to get some nasty (albeit good-natured nasty) comments about the case at the last few tournaments, so I thought I would post it, and defend our choice as a team.
First, I don’t think the case is a good idea in real life. I haven’t met anyone who has. I don’t believe in the pedagogical model of debate as a laboratory for real-world ideas. I believe the most education happens when “debate world” is divorced from the “real world”. Why? Because real-world debate and academic debate have two different purposes. Real-world debate is designed to help human decision-makers with their real-world decisions. Academic debate is designed to teach and put in practice a set of skills. If the case is fallacious, it should be easier for the other team to defeat in the round.
Second, I like challenging my debaters to think outside the box. I can operationally define the box for this debate season as “the Lafayette evidence”. While it has been an invaluable asset in encouraging new competition, it has become the mental patterns for most of the teams this year. I have yet to hear a round in which all of the arguments (if not the evidence) are from that camp pack.
Third, the case is fun. It gets my debaters excited, creates running gags among the debate team, and gets them to do research on something they will enjoy researching. This is not exclusive to the invasion case certainly, but it shouldn’t be minimized.
Anyway, there is my defense. Those who have known me for a while in the debate community know I have a tendency to encourage this kind of thing from time-to-time. Ask Danny Iberri-Shea (from NAU) about my “Invade Cambodia” case from our shared CEDA days. Now that was security assistance.
By the way, for you novices out there. One of the primary stock issues is exceedingly weak in this case. Which is it? 
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
What concerns me most is that your debaters actually argue that the US can use its troops stationed at Guantanamo Bay to invade Cuba. In addition to the fact they aren’t going to get on a boat and circle around to the northern part of the country, there really aren’t troops there. It is a detention camp. Why any judge would vote for that plan confounds me, unless they have no knowledge on the topic whatsoever. Further, I find it quite ethnocentric to suggest that if something is going wrong (like undocumented sex slave trafficking), that the solution is to invade. If that is the solution, we’ve got to figure out a way to invade Texas and other such states. Is that your next Affirmative?
As I said in my post, I don’t actually think it’s a good idea. Although, I should point out that it isn’t only a detention center. It is also a Naval Base with 9,500 troops posted. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_Naval_Base) Your point about ethnocentrism is well-taken, as it would make just as much sense for Cuba to invade Florida to stop the effects of capitalism on the poor in that state.
Note: When I first heard the wording of the topic, I immediately thought that an American conquest and anexation of Cuba could be a big issue: as a NON-TOPICAL – and obviously competitive – Counterplan.
CAVEAT: If I were debating, I’d love to hit this case; so I write this post with mixed feelings. In other words – it obviously ain’t topical, but bring it on!
1. The plan – invading/attacking Cuba – is 100% non-topical, no matter how you spin it.
(A) ACADEMIC STANDARDS: “Constructive engagement” is described in “the academic literature” in a wide variety of ways, but not once has it been defined – by a non-biased academician – as a military attack upon the “target nation.”
(B) COLLOQIAL ENGLISH STANDARD: Come on, now; let’s keep it real, okay? Even if one employs a “person-on-the-street” or “common knowledge” pardigm, an invasion is the quinessential antithesis of a “constructive” policy of any kind. The sine qua non of a military attack is “destructive,” not constructive.
Nevertheless, I’d love to debate this case on its “merits,” because (other than perhaps giving a few yahoos a massive testosterone attack) I don’t think it has any:
1. The United States armed forces are already badly overstretched (we’re recruiting non-citizens and felons now). That is almost a truism, and is easy to prove with “cards.”
2. The best evidence I’ve seen is that total American personnel (including wives, children, and the people who work at the McDonald’s) is currently 7500 people. The concept that 7500 people are going to overthrow the Casto government is absurd. It is exactly the same kind of idiotic, pie-in-the-sky, wishful think that pervaded the CIA immediately before the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.
3. If the War in Iraq, the War In Vietnam, and the abortive Bay of Pigs operation have taught us anything, it’s that – in the real world – the U.S. unilaterally invading other countries is a truly BAD policy… bad for the country we invade (look at what happened to Cambodia after the 1970 U.S. invasion, for example); even worse for America.
4. Hello? What do you think the rest of the world would do if we invaded Cuba? The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and lots of Latin American countries would fall all over themselves to resist American (Yanqui) Imperialism. A good case could be made that an all-out military attack on Cuba – by any outside power – quite plausibly could result in a worldwide nuclear war.
Underviews:
1. I could care less what they did in NDT/CEDA: as noted elsewhere, the rules of this event differ materially from NDT/CEDA rules, customs, and theories.
2. Whatever works at NDT/CEDA re:CP theory is irrelevant here. The NFA
has very specific rules on T and CP’s that don’t exist in NDT/CEDA debate.
Excellent points, and fodder for educational conversation.
For the record, I think that a “constructive engagement” T has a couple of answers. First, while constructive engagement may preclude invasion, the plan (forgetting the 1AC’s “title”) is really a reclaiming of U.S. territory, then a defense against the current regime’s attempt to take it from us. Second, the resolution says we must constructively enagage with Cuba, which may not necessarily mean the false regime that is currently in power. If it can be proven that a sizable amount of Cubans would support such a regime change, then we are constructively enagaging with that movement, and aiding them against communist aggression.
As to your specific points:
1) Yup, the U.S. army is overstretched. But we’ve also shown twice in the last decade the ability to invade and hold lands much larger than Cuba. Whether or not we’re able to “keep” Afghanistan from the Taliban…
2) While some of my debaters might argue that Guantanamo Bay’s forces could do this on their own, that’s not in plan. The Southern Command is very close in southern Florida, and considering the amount of military forces already stations in the southern United States, a quick takeover wouldn’t be a huge logistical nightmare.
3) Agreed. I could argue, however, that is was our unwillingness to fully commit to South Vietnam that lead to the communist rule in that country. Our troops in Cambodia were of course there because the NVA was already there, which isn’t likely in an island nation like Cuba.
4) We’ve invaded Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan since the invention of nuclear weapons, peformed military maneuvers in dozens of other countries, and we haven’t had any nuclear wars. While it is certainly a possibility, it is by no means certain.
I think we agree substantially. I would like this case to be judged on it’s merits, and even lose on topicality of the debater does not successfully defend that point. I’m not arguing that this case should become a model of what NFA LD should run, just throwing it out there as a (possibly) educational affirmative.
It is indeed educational. It taught me that the current judges in the LD division will vote on cases that do not have an iota of solvency. I learned that I need a bigger budget so that I can travel my LDers out of the area; and I also learned that evidence isn’t actually needed to support claims.
For some reason Castro is thought of as a dictator, yet he is a socialist who moved to Cuba to fight Communism. He guarantees healthcare, education, and food to his citizens. While living in Cuba isn’t perfect, at least they aren’t under the illusion that they have rights when they don’t. Last time I checked, Cuba didn’t have the Patriot Act. And there aren’t CEOs gobbling up all of the money and when Hurricane Gustav hit, the government actually helped those afflicted. So….yes it is a fun idea…but I really wish that our college students were actually learning about how it really is in Cuba and not making it up and buying into American paranoia that has monopolized our Government’s rhetoric about Cuba for the last fifty years.
Next case: Revert to the Louisiana Purchase .
sek
Sydne, do you really believe that The Patriot Act is equivalent to the rights repression in Cuba? I’m just trying to get things clear.
Off case: Can anyone please tell me how to post on this sucker? I’m a member and I have a password, but I don’t see a way to post my own thread.
Confused in La Canada,
Michael
sonofshasta1970@yahoo.com
P.S. Cuba Libre!
Blah, blah, non-topical, blah, blah, no specific solvency advocate, blah, blah.
Sure there are lots of problems with this aff, but the strategic value of the aff is weak. The case just doesn’t have a viable terminal impact. Debaters would do well to run disads against this case. A little bit of spread-and-collapse would go a long way to defeating this case.
If you are going to ‘invade’ – it is hard to win unless you have evidence that says ‘invasion inevitable’ to non-unique the disads and win on time-frame specific advantages. Absent that kind of scenario, the regime you are toppling better be on the brink of starting some kind of nuclear holocaust or something.
That said, this post is not supposed to sound hostile at all. I think it is cool that you all are pushing the limits (extreme limits, hehe) of the topic and that your debaters are having fun doing it. I just can’t see this aff winning very many rounds long term. This seems like a fun one-shot aff, but doesn’t sound like it has much long-term chance at success.
Eric,
I do not think that it is appropriate for the debaters to characterize Cuba as such a horrible and restrictive place when in reality it is not. Sure there are regulations regarding what can and cannot be said, but regulations exist in our country as well. Fidel is not a communist, and people in the US are the ones saying he is a dictator. We are regulated in this country, and denied many things that Cubans are guaranteed. Too many people presume that the American way of life is the best, and should be readily imposed on other cultures. Invading a country “for their own good” is such an argument. Much of the literature we are exposed to comes from a sense of paranoia. And the argument has been made that there is way more censorship in our country than exists in Cuba. It is foolish for people to suggest that America has all the answers and America should tell everyone else how to live.
James Cockroft, “Open Letter on US policy for Cuba” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 162, no. 5, September 2008, pp. 172-173.
David Slater, “Imperial Geopolitics and the Promise of Democracy,” Development and Change, vol. 38, no. 6, 2007, pp. 1041-1054.
I wasn’t offended by the case, I was concerned as an educator when I heard college students talking about the situation in another country and they clearly had not read about the country. I likened it to last year when a Ninth grader thought that there were no roads in Africa and that everyone on the continent was poor and hungry, or when my Argument student recently said that all Mexicans rode bikes and there was no public transportation in Mexico.
We’ve got to remember that many of our students have not traveled out of the state, they have a very limited view of the world around them, and get their information from Fox News and YouTube. Debate has a way of helping to educate, but only if there is an actual attempt to research and get to know the world outside their own. We have a responsibility to help our students make true arguments, or at least arguments that are backed up by actual evidence.
I know that Mike is on top of things and has a broad world view, but the students may be a little too young and a little too limited to get that the whole case idea was a sociological experiment. I was concerned that the students, based upon what I heard them say in their debates, believed that the plan was a good idea and the depiction of Cuba and the people of Cuba was true. But offended? I do not personalize it at all, and Mike knows that.
My bad, I guess I misread some of your comments as indignation…one of the flaws of this medium is that the receiver often applies emphasis when it’s not intended.
People will say dumb and uninformed things all the time. The great thing about debate is you get to point it out to a third party, who will then adjudicate the argument. When people say things that are dumb or incongruous, it just means the round is easier to win!
Oh yeah, one other thing!
Kudos to Mike and CBU for disclosing their aff. Especially one as controversial as this and one which would clearly benefit from the surprise factor.
Disclosure is sweet.
What is wrong with Fox News? Personally I think that it is the best news network on television right now.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
I love the first card. Reminds me of a line from one of my favorite songs…”I think this place is full of spies…I think they’re on to me…”