By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on September 7, 2021
A man with alcohol on his breath enters a place where students are gathering and starts beating one of the young men. He demands over and over again that he acknowledge paternity of the child his daughter is carrying. The young man is beaten so badly that he is almost exhausted. When the offended assailant returns home, he discovers that the pregnancy test he found in his daughter’s room was not hers, but a neighbor’s.
This simple anecdote could illustrate the history of health symptoms that prominent US officials in Havana began to report and link to an alleged attack, just as the presidential elections that brought Donald Trump to power in Washington were taking place. The unusual events were reported within the embassy by a small number of staff members who were not involved in diplomatic functions. The alleged discomfort then spread to a wider group of employees.
On February 17, 2017, the then US Chargé d’Affaires in Havana forwarded a complaint to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREX) about alleged “attacks” against his staff, which had theoretically been taking place since November of the previous year. There was no mention of illness or symptoms at the time. Cuban experts immediately mobilized and began investigating, without even questioning why the information had not been shared with them from the outset.
Paradoxically, those affected did not seek medical attention at the clinics where they had always been treated in Havana, as their Cuban counterparts in Washington had done until then and continue to do today.
Five days after the first report, Cuban officials met with the head of security at the US embassy and realized that he was unaware of what was happening among the people he was supposed to protect. A few hours later, that individual’s name appeared on a list of alleged victims of the alleged attacks and he was evacuated to the United States.
Cuba offered its willingness to cooperate in clarifying the facts, whether real or not, and indicated that cooperation with US agencies was very important. Protection measures at the embassy and the diplomats’ residences were quickly reinforced, and new channels of communication were opened.
At the highest level of the Cuban government, a police investigation was launched and an inter-agency and interdisciplinary committee of scientific experts was appointed to analyze the reports. The investigations concluded that there was no evidence to prove any attack and that such a wide range of symptoms could not be attributed to a common cause.
The FBI visited Havana four times to conduct its own analysis with complete freedom. In the end, its conclusions coincided with the opinion of Cuban experts that there was no evidence of attacks, but the State Department rejected the Bureau’s proposal to involve the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, which also had long-standing scientific exchanges with Cuban counterparts, in the investigation.
From January to mid-2017, US embassy officials in Havana requested a large number of visas for close relatives and friends to travel to the island and also covered the procedures for traveling to other Cuban provinces as tourists on countless occasions. This behavior was not consistent with the attitude of a group of people who are subject to any external harassment.
In private diplomatic meetings, US officials in both Washington and Havana used the term “attacks” to refer to the unexplained events, while their Cuban counterparts warned against jumping to conclusions and repeatedly urged the US to provide concrete evidence.
All the limited information that was passed on to the Cuban side through diplomatic channels seemed designed to mislead and document alleged inaccurate facts. On one occasion, it was a small-scale map of the city of Havana with large red dots in different locations, which did not allow the exact place where the reported incident could have taken place to be identified. On another occasion, it was recordings of strange sounds which, when measured and compared with other recordings, indicated that they corresponded to the buzzing of insects common on the island.
After the Cuban diplomatic security service agreed with the US embassy on a mechanism to alert the authorities in real time about the occurrence of incidents, on several occasions this mechanism was not used and on others the information arrived very late.
The State Department limited itself to a terse line of messages: something had happened in Havana and the Cuban side had to explain it, even without them saying exactly what had happened. In sporting terms, it was the closest thing to shooting at a moving target.
The US government then began to transfer a group of US officials and their families from Havana, who paradoxically made public their incomprehension of the measure and their desire to return to their posts. In other words, this group did not share the theory of attacks, or at least considered them to be of such relative importance that they could afford to return. However, they were denied this possibility and most were quickly reassigned to other positions.
In August, with the same level of vagueness with which the issue had been treated up to that point, the news hit the US media. Months later, another journalist coined the term for a supposed syndrome associated with the name of the Cuban capital, and theories and speculations were diligently put together based on intentionally inaccurate and sensationalist statements and alleged leaks from various official federal sources.
When reviewing press reports from those days, it is clear that information about the alleged attacks flowed to the US public through specific journalists from designated media outlets, with the rest simply echoing the story without asking uncomfortable questions or questioning the official version. Cuban officials located and spoke with the executives of these media outlets, who were never able to deny that their journalists were being used by unidentified US government sources to create more confusion rather than seek an explanation. Nor could they justify the periodic repetition of the story, despite the fact that there was nothing new to report.
There was speculation about alleged weapons used in the attacks that generated sounds or waves, for which there are no records of manufacturers, blueprints, or traces. These were attributed to capabilities that are neither proven nor demonstrated by science.
In the absence of consensus on a possible “lethal weapon,” there was then talk of possible perpetrators of the attacks, who, without anyone documenting their existence, could have been “dissident” Cuban officials who, incidentally, had absolutely nothing to gain from damaging bilateral relations, or actors from third countries. The real dissent, in any case, lay in Washington, among those who wanted to reverse President Barack Obama’s policy toward Cuba and were in dire need of a good argument, tangible or not, to begin taking steps to ensure the process of regression.
Before long, a significant portion of the US public believed as much in “sonic attacks” as they did in McDonald’s and Coca-Cola being healthy foods.
It was Cuba, not the United States, that requested a meeting of foreign ministers to discuss the matter, which was held in Washington on September 26, 2017. At the meeting, it was clear that the highest levels of the State Department were not informed of the details of the FBI’s investigations in Havana.
It was striking that then-Secretary Rex Tillerson, a former top executive at Exxon Mobile, a company that spends millions of dollars searching for fossil fuels only if there is hard and pure evidence that they are located in specific beds, proceeded to damage bilateral relations with Cuba without any material evidence.
During that visit to Washington, D.C., the Cuban foreign minister presented his arguments in Congress before eight senators and the minority leadership of the House of Representatives, and his counterparts appreciated the exchange. Congress had held several private hearings on the issue up to that point (and did so afterwards), but in absolutely none of them did the government offer any useful information, not even under the veil of the most hermetic legislative secrecy.
From the Capitol, the Foreign Minister left for the National Press Club, where he met with the most prominent members of the group of US reporters covering foreign policy. The Cuban minister then made a long list of questions about the inconsistencies in the case that remain unanswered to this day. The impact of his presentation in the US press, however, was marginal.
In subsequent exchanges, the State Department acknowledged that it had no information on the medical conditions of its diplomats before they left for Cuba or other destinations, and therefore could neither confirm nor rule out that the symptoms presented by several officials who had recently arrived in Havana (which were dissimilar) were not caused by a pre-existing condition.
But the State Department needed to give some veil of credibility to such inconsistency, and finally an article appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) which, although written to give a scientific slant to the accusation against Cuba, nevertheless added further doubts to what had already been said and did not put forward any conclusive thesis. The Cuban side did not even have to question it, because the publication’s own editorial board did so in the same issue, distancing itself from the text.
As Cuba continued to insistently request a meeting between scientists from both sides to analyze the issue, the State Department only agreed in 2018 to allow a group of officials from that agency to receive an official Cuban delegation. The latter presented all the inconsistencies it found in the case, while the US side always responded with sentences taken from the JAMA article. However, in a show of professional integrity that was rare at the time, the US officials did make it clear that they never suggested to the federal agency’s leadership that the incidents in question be referred to as attacks.
On that occasion, the Cuban experts took it upon themselves to arrange a meeting with renowned US counterparts in fields related to the case, from neurology to psychiatry. There was complete agreement on the approach of both sides. In the absence of a venue for a press conference to present the results of the debate, the Cuban Embassy summoned media leaders who had been following the issue for many months. There was a lively exchange of questions and answers on the subject, and the journalists wrote their reports, but their respective editors did not consider the content to be newsworthy that day. Little was published.
At this point, it may be worth mentioning just a few of the questions that scientists and observers from various countries (not only Cuba) raised early on about the first official US version of events:
Collen G. Le Prell, director of the audiology program at the University of Texas: “The audiology community is wondering what could be causing the symptoms described in these cases, as no one has a good explanation for them” (…) “The sudden onset of hearing loss without an audible source is very unusual.” (Newsweek, August 29, 2017)
Andrew Oxenham, psychologist at the Laboratory for Perception and Cognition at the University of Minnesota: “I cannot explain how the illness and hearing loss are related to a sound… there is no way that an acoustic device could cause hearing damage using inaudible sounds. You can’t stimulate the inner ear in a way that could cause damage.” (Buzz Feed News, August 30, 2017)
James Jauchem, retired biologist and scientist who researched the biological effects of acoustic energy at the US Air Force Research Laboratory: “It is not known what evidence researchers have to claim that this is an acoustic weapon.” (The Verge, September 16, 2017)
Joe Pompei, former researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founder and president of Holosonics: “There has never been any kind of physiological response that reflects the symptoms that have been reported as caused by sound waves of any kind.” (Business Insider, September 29, 2017)
Jurgen Altmann, physicist at the Technische Universitat Dortmund in Germany: “I would say it’s quite implausible,” “I don’t know of any acoustic effect that can cause concussion symptoms.” (The New York Times, October 5, 2017)
Jun Qin, acoustic engineer at Southern Illinois University: “Sound through the air cannot shake your head.”
“Ultrasound cannot travel long distances.” (The New York Times, October 5, 2017)
Adam Rogers, a journalist for Wired magazine specializing in technology, noted: “The adventures of 007 and the X-Files in Cuba continue.” (Wired, October 5, 2017)
The list of similar opinions was endless and continues to be so four years later. At one point, the creators of the syndrome abandoned the sonic explanation for the attacks because it had become untenable, and turned to speculation about microwaves, which has also been unsupported by science.
The now-coined “Havana Syndrome” was a useful argument for the United States in front of its own public and third parties to justify closing the consular services of its embassy in the Cuban capital, discontinuing immigration and citizenship services there, reducing the Cuban diplomatic presence in Washington, issuing travel alerts to Cuba, reducing the flow of visitors to that destination, and to question the commitment of the Cuban authorities to the safety of foreign diplomats on its territory.
But what would Cuba have gained if it had actually harassed US officials in any way? Can anyone in their right mind believe that the Cuban authorities wanted a regression in bilateral relations that would additionally lead to new blockade measures?
There was no crime, no victims, no evidence, no murder weapon, and no motive. So what was the basis for the accusations levelled against Cuba for months?
With Tillerson now gone from the State Department, the new Secretary Mike Pompeo sought to cover his bases by stating: “The precise nature of the injuries suffered by the affected personnel, and whether there is a common cause for all of the cases, has not yet been determined.” But Pompeo came from the CIA, the agency to which most of those who insisted they had been attacked belonged.
For several months, the alleged attacks appeared to be a bilateral issue between the United States and Cuba, and if any reference was made to a third party, it was in terms of “some power interested in harming US officials,” which, as a result of further speculation, was identified as Russia.
However, the official US narrative took an unexpected turn when an official from that country reported symptoms of the syndrome, a little further from the Caribbean, in China (April 2018). Curiously, there were no excesses in the behavior of the State Department, and none of the measures taken against Cuba, which are still in force, were taken against the Asian nation. Although other prominent officials in the same country attempted to join the epidemic of attacks, the official version only recorded one, and it was soon out of the headlines.
The story became even more implausible when two different people were registered with symptoms of “Havana Syndrome” on US territory in April 2021, and subsequently other prominent US officials in Germany and Austria joined them in August 2021. In response to these events, Washington did not demand additional security measures from Berlin or Vienna (or from itself) for the comfort of its citizens, nor did it reduce the flow of US visitors to those destinations.
If all the speculation about Cuba was true, how could it now be explained that an evil power was moving across half the world, including the US capital, with a “weapon” estimated to be the size of a tank, which would have to emit a sound intense enough to cause brain damage, with such a sophisticated directional capability that it would only affect selected individuals and not those moving a few meters away from the target?
And the inevitable happened: the theory that was created to damage relations with a foreign country was used by the alleged victims to file lawsuits in US courts accusing the State Department and other agencies of failing to adequately protect their employees. The hunter ended up being hunted.
Throughout this time, Cuba has observed an attitude of total adherence to science, sharing the opinions and analyses of Cuban experts who have analyzed, studied, and exchanged the limited information available, and offering cooperation without engaging in unsubstantiated speculation. However, after facing alone for a long period the only punitive measures that Washington implemented in response to the “attacks,” there is reason to consider some generalizations.
The victimized officials are mostly not diplomats, but are linked to US intelligence agencies. They shared not only physical and isolated spaces in their country’s embassies abroad, but also specific technology in their workplaces, as well as common habits, conditions, and demands that surely forced them to face high psychological and emotional stress.
It would be well worth the time for US agencies to engage in some introspection and, if they are unwilling to do so, at least show a more consistent attitude in addressing the problem as a whole. If none of this is possible, one would hope that they would rectify a course of action inherited from a previous administration, implemented with the clear intention of causing an irreversible setback in bilateral relations with Cuba.
Thanks to the professional declassification work of the US organization National Security Archives, three reports on what has been called “Havana Syndrome” were published in February 2021, drafted by the State Department, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. All of them reflected what happened in relation to this issue during the Trump years: the lack of cooperation of the agencies employing those affected with those conducting the investigations, non-existent access to those involved, hasty decisions motivated by political considerations, and the absence of a theory to explain the attribution of diverse symptoms to a common cause.
In particular, the aforementioned State Department report suggested that Donald Trump’s decision to dismantle the embassy in Havana in early 2018, in response to alleged “sonic attacks” against his diplomatic staff, was a political “response” riddled with mismanagement, lack of coordination, and non-compliance with regulations. The same text revealed that the former president made the decision to reduce consular staff in Havana by 60% and shut down the embassy without any evidence that Cuba was behind the mysterious health problems affecting his officials.
The report stated: “The decision to reduce personnel in Havana does not appear to have followed standard State Department procedures and was not preceded or followed by any formal analysis of the risks and benefits of the continued physical presence of US government employees in Havana.”
A confession is as good as evidence.
We can agree that the next time someone demands paternity obligations, they should first show evidence of pregnancy, or at least not resort to extreme positions.
Source: Cubadebate translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English