Everything started suddenly, with grinding noises that seemed to come from a specific place . Some experienced it as a pressure or vibration, others as a sensation comparable to driving a car with the window half down. These noises, which one of those affected described as “mechanical sounds”, lasted between 20 seconds and 30 minutes, and always occurred while the diplomats were at home or in their hotel rooms . The curious thing is that close people, relatives and guests in neighboring rooms said they did not hear anything.
Some affected experienced adverse health effects, such as an unnamed US diplomat who is said to now require a hearing aid. Affected people described symptoms such as hearing loss, memory loss and nausea. The State Department claimed that everything had been caused by an attack or exposure to a still unknown device, and although they were not blaming the Cuban government they said they would find the culprit.
In August 2017, the US government expelled two Cuban diplomats in response, and in September the State Department said it was withdrawing non-essential personnel from its embassy in Havana, warning citizens not to travel to Cuba. In October, Donald Trump said: “It is a very unusual attack, but I think Cuba is responsible.”
But the situation was not as clear as the US government wanted to make it appear. In January 2018, the Associated Press released an FBI report saying it had found no evidence of a sonic attack, and in November 2018, The New Yorker magazine revealed that the FBI investigation had been hampered by the CIA and the Department of Justice. of State for the reason that is always used in these cases: national security . At the same time, that same month of January, the State Department convened a Responsibility Review Board, an internal mechanism that it has to study security incidents involving diplomatic personnel.
On March 2, 2018, the State Department confirmed that it would continue to maintain its embassy with the minimum level of staff necessary to perform “basic diplomatic and consular functions.” And then there was new news from Canada: a series of tests conducted in Pittsburgh on an unspecified number of Canadian diplomats showed evidence of brain damage similar to that found in their American counterparts. In the spring of 2018, Global Affairs Canada – the department in charge of consular and diplomatic relations – withdrew all its personnel from Cuba along with families and reported that several of those affected in 2017 had not yet been able to return to work. In 2019, the government of that country announced that it was reducing the staff of its embassy in Havana after a fourteenth diplomat presented symptoms of what began to be called “the Havana syndrome” at the end of December 2018.
In February 2019, several Canadian diplomats sued the government for negligence. During the trial, the government responded that its diplomats had exaggerated the symptoms and presented a study carried out by an independent environmental consultancy that did not find any unusual phenomenon in the embassy. He admitted that 14 of the plaintiffs had something similar to a concussion, but he did not know what caused it.
The Cuban government, obviously, accused the North American of being a liar and offered to cooperate with the United States in an investigation in which two thousand scientists and policemen participated, interviewing 300 neighbors of the diplomats involved, examining two hotels and carrying out in-depth checks on non-diplomatic personnel who may have been exposed. Air samples were analyzed for chemical agents, they questioned whether electromagnetic waves were the culprit, and even investigated whether it could have been insects, but found nothing that could explain the symptoms . Since then, the Canadian government has dedicated itself to remaining silent in response to what is supposedly happening in Cuba and ‘recommends’ its employees to remain silent on the whole matter.
The medical reports, some published in scientific journals, divided the experts: for some it was clear that something was happening while others called these studies sloppy and unrigorous and that nothing could be deduced from it. For some we were facing a case of collective hysteria ; for others, before something that is usually seen in neurology consultations; and a few said that it could have been caused by some type of ultrasound or by microwaves since those affected had real brain damage. The Canadian government advanced another explanation: exposure to high levels of a pesticide containing organophosphates , which is commonly used in Cuba to keep mosquitoes carrying diseases such as Zika at bay. In fact, in September 2020, an article was published in the journal JAMA Neurology describing the case of a 69-year-old tourist who, while returning on the plane from her vacation in Cuba, began to show symptoms similar to those described by diplomats, and had to be admitted to the emergency room as soon as the plane landed. The doctors’ conclusion was organophosphate poisoning.
And as this battle raged in medical journals, in 2020 other US diplomats began appearing at Chinese and Russian embassies claiming to have the same symptoms.
To this day, neither the Canadian nor the US government has any idea of what really happened in Havana between 2016 and 2017.
