By Rosa Miriam Elizalde on May 23, 2024 from Havana
Normally, those who don’t want answers don’t ask questions.
During the Cold War, specialists in international politics appropriated the conventional pattern that every appearance deceives, whose strict limits, like those of all paranoia, were based on the conviction that behind any fact related to the Soviet Union there were mysterious hidden conspiracies. Obviously, the excesses went beyond reasonable limits and the risk was always the expansion of communism.
In his extraordinary trilogy The Information Age, sociologist Manuel Castells discusses an example of this mentality, too quickly forgotten. In 1995, The New York Times published the conclusions of a mystery about the alleged invasion of Swedish waters by Soviet submarines, which kept NATO on alert for more than two decades and led to the regular launching of explosive depth charges in the Baltic Sea, broadcast on television to the world.
It all began on the morning of October 28, 1981, when a fisherman alerted the Swedish naval base in Karlskrona that a Soviet-flagged submarine was stranded on rocks 500 kilometers off Stockholm. It was a Whisky-class submersible, which the Eastern military referred to as the S-363. The Swedish government and a large part of the political spectrum, who under the cloak of neutrality were clear about where their hearts were, did not miss the opportunity to create a collective mood bordering on hysteria.
The incident was immediately baptized as Whisky on the Rocks, a sensationalist code that appeared every morning of God in the great western press and initiated the fashion of giving juicy names to any crazy theory that transpired to the voice of the corner and in the style of what happens today with the so-called Havana syndrome, but we will talk about it later.
It was not until 1995 that Sweden confirmed that that Whisky on the rocks had been a fortuitous accident and that the noises of the communists’ spy devices, heard for years in the Baltic Sea, came from “an embarrassing fact: that their defense forces had been hunting minks, not Russian submarines […]. New hydrophonic instruments introduced into the Swedish Navy in 1992 proved that they were only minks, those small mammals whose fur has hung from the shoulders of so many ladies and whose swim bladder movements emit sounds that the delicate Swedish detection systems interpreted as coming from submarines” (The New York Times, 12/2/1995, p. 8). No reference was made in the report to the fate of the minks and the embarrassing conspiracy theory was buried. There was also no longer any Soviet Union, by the way.
Since the spring of 2017, with the arrival of Donald Trump in the White House, we returned to another high-blood-alcohol moment. The Havana syndrome was unleashed, alleged sonic attacks against the delicate ears of agents of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, which, as the brilliant Cuban diplomat Johana Tablada told the AP agency correspondent at the time, “the Havana syndrome, Andrea, does not exist, it is not in any disease registry, and it has truly been the Washington syndrome from the beginning.”
That scandalous conspiracy was used as a pretext for the Trump administration to apply 240 additional measures to the blockade of more than 60 years against Cuba and for Joe Biden to keep them unalterable with pandemics, wars and international crises of all kinds, punishing a people who do not deserve at all the tribulations they are suffering. Yesterday a friend told me what he had heard someone else say: “How much the world has lost! He could not see what Cuba would have been like with Fidel Castro and without the blockade”.
With the Havana syndrome hovering over the story, last weekend CBS published a sensationalist report accusing Cuba of being a danger to U.S. national security and has taken the story of the implausible sonic attacks to the next step: there are Cuban spies under every gringo rock and President Miguel Diaz-Canel passes information to all the bad guys on duty, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Hamas and any other villain you, reader, want to pin on the sequence.
In short, another sultry Whisky on the rocks, but with 40 degrees Celsius in the shade, which is the temperature you feel right now in front of Havana’s Malecon. (Taken from La Jornada).
Rosa Miriam Elizalde is a Cuban journalist and editor, PhD in Communication Sciences and professor at the University of Havana. Columnist for the newspaper La Jornada, Mexico. She has published several books. She was founder and editor of the digital weekly La Jiribilla and the online newspaper Cubadebate.
Source: Cubaperiodista, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English