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Havana has lately been more interested in improving relations than has Washington. In the areas of disaster response, medical cooperation, and environmental protection, Cuba has been interested in extending and deepening cooperation, while the United States has been reluctant. Other areas, such as counter-narcotics, show a similar pattern. The United States has been content to live with perpetual hostility toward Cuba because the costs have been relatively low. Nevertheless, self-interest will push Washington and Havana toward cooperation on these issues, even if the overall relationship remains strained. Hurricanes, plagues, and oil spills do not respect national boundaries, so neither country can adequately protect itself without cooperating with the other. If such cooperation cannot bridge the bilateral divide and lead to friendship between the United States and Cuba, perhaps it can at least move them from being unmitigated enemies to respectful adversaries.

Interpreting security as the effacement of mortality enables us to dramatically broaden the scope of research to include non-anticipatory temporalities of security. In this chapter, present-tense emergency management is exposed as a technique of mortality effacement. States efface the trauma of mortality and re-establish security by performing the rituals of emergency management: erecting cordons, organising the triage of bodies, and reconciling bodies with their previous living identities (‘disaster victim identification’). Disaster response is a reconstitutive performance of security and sovereignty against the incursion of death and trauma.

The core of the West Indies consists of the archipelago of islands that stretches southeast from the Yucatan and Florida peninsulas to Venezuela. Generally the term “West Indies” is synonymous with the “Antilles” and is therefore often used to refer to the islands that compose the Greater and Lesser Antilles. The islands of the Greater Antilles include Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica—all located in the north Caribbean Sea—while the Lesser Antilles encompasses the smaller islands found to the south and east. In total, the West Indies embraces about 25 island territories. There are complex mountain ranges in the Greater Antilles, such as the Blue Mountains (2257 m) in central Jamaica and the Pico Duarte (3175 m) in the Dominican Republic, smaller volcanic peaks in the northeast island arc, and low-lying islands composing the remainder of the Lesser Antilles. The variation in local topography contributes significantly to the general rainfall pattern across the West Indian islands, as the windward sides of the larger and more mountainous islands are rainy and windswept, while the leeward sides are drier. In comparison, the low-lying eastern islands receive much less rainfall due to their lack of topographic relief and are much more dependent on seasonal rains. It is, however, the location of the West Indian islands between the permanent high pressure zone of the subtropical north Atlantic (the Azores high) and the equatorial trough of low pressure that gives rise to the mean monthly West Indian rainfall depicted in figure 11.2. Early in the year (December through March) and for a brief period in July, the Caribbean is dominated by subsidence from the inner zone of the Azores high and is at its driest. Rainfall during this period (barring July) is largely from the intrusion of fronts from North America. By the onset of the rainy season, however, the Azores high drifts farther north, resulting in weakened trade winds. At the same time, the Caribbean Sea warms up.