Blockades, Embargos, and the Face of the Politicized Other

All human experience is situated in specific sociocultural and political contexts that profoundly shape that which we know and that which we cannot know. In this article, I use my personal experience of traveling to Cuba as a U.S. citizen, in violation of the U.S. embargo against Cuba, to reflect on the consequences of severing dialogue. I argue that dialogue expands my understanding of my situatedness by exposing the gap between the person I was shaped be by virtue of my throwness, and the person I aspire to be based upon my own value system. I conclude that in the process of making an ethical claim on a person who seeks understanding, dialogue also expands one’s possibilities for meaningful existence.