April 4, 2024
Associated Press (AP) interview with Johana Tablada, Cuban Deputy Director General for the United States at MINREX by reporter Andrea Rodriguez.
Andrea: We have all seen or read the story on this report, from three important media outlets, somehow re-hashing the Havana syndrome, correct? What is Cuba’s position on this?
Johana: Andrea, there is no such thing as the Havana syndrome, it does not exist, it is not registered in any disease registry, and it has really been the Washington syndrome from the beginning.
Our reaction is one of concern, because it is not an investigation: the program on CBS, a powerful network in the United States, is unsustainable and inexplicable; and beyond the many adjectives, the presentation of witnesses who have nothing to do with the story that from the beginning was an operation, today it is presented again, not as a journalistic investigation, but as a political operation, as a propaganda operation.
Its striking how CBS considers that the public does not have the right to know, about a material that is supposedly relevant, that there are solid scientific reports, commissioned by the Trump administration, which it stuck in a drawer for two years, such as the “Jason Report”, which clearly concludes, so to speak, that the symptoms that may have been real cannot be attributed to an extraordinary cause, such as an attack, but are linked to natural conditions, to pre-existing diseases or environmental issues.
There is also the report by the Cuban Academy of Sciences, by a committee of Cuban experts, which also agrees with this result. There are the two reports by the NIH, the National Institute of Health of the United States, the National Institutes of Health of the United States, one very recently; and well, there is the report by the US government, which a little over a year ago, or almost a year ago, the national director of intelligence, Mrs. Avril Haines, came out and said that the exhaustive studies by several US national security agencies, which independently came to the same determination, had concluded: that the symptoms reported in those health incidents, show no evidence to support or confirm, that they are due to external actions and that they are associated with natural conditions, pre-existing illnesses, stress or environmental conditions.
It seems to us that the public has the right to know this, which is openly omitted in this recent work. Also omitted in this work are the testimonies of people who were supposedly affected and which have been published by the press in the past, such as the letter written by people who were stationed in Havana at the time and asked the State Department not to send them back home, that they did not feel attacked or in danger. That was also erased from history.
And honestly one is lead to ponder, who is interested in continuing to talk about a story that is fiction? Who is interested in resurrecting during an election year the false accusations that led to dozens and dozens of additional coercive measures against Cuba and whose main objective was, in 2017, to impose a “detente” and abruptly halt a process of improvement in Cuba-U.S. relations? It was definitely not in Cuba’s interest to interrupt that process.
It was in the interest of Senator Marco Rubio at the time, it was in the interest of the incoming Trump administration, the U.S. government, which had no way to stop the enthusiasm in the United States and in Cuba with the advance in bilateral relations, and in the world. So, really, none of those measures taken against Cuba or almost none of them have been reversed, except for the travel alert.
Reports of abnormal health incidents were made in a hundred places in the world. No measures were taken against any other country. Here, the U.S. Consulate in Havana was closed, the personnel in both missions was reduced to the minimum, visas were interrupted, Cuba was fraudulently included in the terrorist list; and all this has had an impact in causing suffering among the Cuban people, in separating the people from the U.S. and Cuba and in separating Cuban families.
That is where one needs to look, any serious interested party cannot overlook the real evidence, before going to fabricate, as happens in this material, a document that, and I insist, is a fabrication, its a political operation that is unfounded and completely undoes the evidence accumulated since 2017 to date.
Andrea: Why does Cuba care, if at the end of the day, they are now accusing Russia? I mean, they don’t mess with Cuba anymore. So, why? Everything you mention is part of a story; but, if we are talking about a political operation, we are talking about a political operation now going forward. Nobody is interested in a backward political operation, but in waiting for the thing to move forward. So, why is Cuba particularly interested in this situation, or how would it affect Cuba, if at the end of the day, “the guy” is Russia?
Johana: Cuba is interested because it is once again doing the same thing that has been the main objective of many US governments, and of the most conservative or fractious or extreme sectors of US society, both those of Cuban origin and the neo-conservatives in the United States. And Cuba is interested because it is trying to present Cuba once again as a threat to the national security of the United States, and because, even when Cuba is no longer the supposed main character, Cuban territory is presented as a place where foreign powers or foreign countries can carry out acts against the United States, and Cuba’s tradition of protecting U.S. diplomatic personnel in Havana is well known. The U.S. embassy here in Cuba does not even resemble embassies in other countries, because it does not look like a bunker, because there are no real threats, neither of terrorism nor of organized crime nor of any kind of attack.
It matters to Cuba because Cuba continues in play, Cuba who would never lend itself to be a proxy of any other country, and Cuba at no time accepts that our territory be used to attack another sovereign state, be it the United States or any other. Therefore, this fiction and the revival of this fiction is harmful to Cuba; it associates us once again with the conspiracy theories of those sectors that want to justify not only the outrage that today constitutes the US blockade against Cuba, which has been tightened with additional measures of asphyxiation and pressure, and a medieval siege against the Cuban population that is being suffered by all Cubans, and that it is no longer possible to hide the direct link that exists between the impact of these measures, which have their origin in theories such as this one, or in this very theory, that Cuba was either the protagonist or the accomplice or the territory that was used to attack, something that hasn’t even been proven; so far, what science has shown is that there was no attack whatsoever; and to bring that up again is to try to present Cuba as the threat that it is not, it is to try to justify the measures of maximum pressure and suffocation against Cuba’s economy, the destabilization and intervention projects, and to try to justify the measures of maximum pressure and suffocation against Cuba’s economy, the destabilization and intervention projects.
In Cuba’s internal politics, with the ultimate aim of domination, and the actions and communication operations of disinformation and loss of credibility. That is why it is very important for Cuba to once again come out and refute what has already been refuted time and again by Cuba, by foreign governments, by the U.S. government itself and by at least three scientific reports that carry weight.
How are we going to believe a person, who nobody knows who he is, and we are not going to pay attention to or give credibility to reports in which teams of scientists from the academies of science of both countries, from a group of recognized important scientists from the United States, participated?
Today, there is no one in the world who truly believes, with information and a detailed study of the evidence presented, that there was such a thing as the Havana syndrome. It is a syndrome that we have to look for in the office of Senator Marco Rubio, who was the one who initially leaked it, when the FBI, – I failed to mention that report -, when the FBI had already concluded its report saying that there was no evidence whatsoever.
The word “attack” was even a word invented by Tillerson, the then Secretary of State, which did not last long when Trump fired him. And that of the Havana Syndrome, we know that it was also an invention of a not very serious news site or with very little respect for itself. So, the real victims here have been the truth, journalism, which was desecrated in this program all the minimum rules of journalism, and respect for the public and the audience of this type of program, and the media that echoes it without looking at everything you did today that proves otherwise.
Thank you very much
Source: Minrex