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Victims of ‘Havana Syndrome’ to Receive Financial Relief

Cuba, El American

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American diplomats and foreign service officials anguishing from the “Havana Syndrome” will soon have broader financial resources available to them. The U.S. Senate passed on Monday the Helping American Victims Afflicted by Neurological Attacks Act, more commonly known as the Havana Act, with the rarity of a unanimous vote.

According to The New York Times, over one hundred and thirty federal personnel have been impacted while serving the United States in Cuba, China, and Russia. Additional potential cases exhibiting the same symptoms have been exhibited in parts of Western Europe, Asia, and even domestically. 

What is the ‘Havana Syndrome’?

Conveyed as sonic attacks, this apparent humanly engineered illness, makes its initial manifestation as strong, cricket-like echoes. It first reared its ugly head in late 2016, among the American Embassy workers in Havana, Cuba, thus accounting for its name. The host of maladies that the Havana Syndrome produces include brutal headaches, head pressures, intense vertigo, memory loss, cognitive depletion, hearing disorders, visual loss, and constant piercing sounds. There is no cure or effective treatment for this tormenting malice. 

American diplomats in Cuba are not the only targets of this act, which some have called an act of war. More than a dozen Canadian diplomats stationed in Havana around the same timeframe have also been afflicted. American diplomats in Guangzhou, China began reporting these same ailments in early 2017. Russian territory, as well, has evidenced these sonic attacks.

Marc Polymeropoulos — a seasoned CIA officer for over 26 years with an extensive service file that includes complicated assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as being the agency’s second highest ranking figure for clandestine operations in Europe and Russia — believe to have suffered the Havana Syndrome onslaught while on an official visit to Moscow in 2017. “I was awoken in the middle of the night,” Polymeropoulos stated, “I just had incredible vertigo, dizziness. I wanted to throw up. The room was spinning. I couldn’t even stand up without falling down. I had tinnitus ringing in my ears.”

Other CIA officers in adjoining rooms at the Moscow Marriot, near the United States Embassy, suffered similar fates. Many other agency personnel working in Europe in operations dealing with Russia, according to Polymeropoulos, have also been affected.   

It was to be expected that the dictatorial regimes in Cuba, China, and Russia would negate any involvement in this “mysterious”, permanently disabling ailment. The fact remained, however, that these strange cognitive crippling ailments aggrieving American diplomats, intelligence officers, defense workers, and members of their families that had been assigned United States government tasks in Havana, Guangzhou, Moscow, and other European cities, needed feasible answers, as well as financial and medical remedies. At the request of the State Department, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) was designated the chore of attempting to arrive at a conclusion, as to the root cause of the affliction.


A sixty-four-page report issued in December 2020, “An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies”, was the result. The NASEM’s inquiry was led by nineteen experts from the fields of neurology, radiology, electrical engineering, other prevalent fields, and their staffs. The study concurred with the victim’s testimonies and accurately depicted the painful plight.

“The sudden onset of a perceived loud sound,” related the report, “a sensation of intense pressure or vibration in the head, and pain in the ear or more diffusely in the head. Most individuals reported that the sound or these other sensations seemed to originate from a particular direction and were perceived only when the individual was in a specific physical location. Some also reported sudden onset of tinnitus, hearing loss, dizziness, unsteady gait, and visual disturbances.”

The “plausible” cause of the Havana Syndrome, concluded the NASEM official study, was hyper-intense microwave radiation directed at the afflicted targets. The leading theory which directs us into the heinous purpose of the use of such damaging intense electromagnetic energy waves was to extract information from the victim’s cellphones and electronic devices, from a near distance, without being detected. In other words, this solid, believable hypothesis is wholesale, barefaced espionage carried out by Cuba, China, and Russia, against the United States. 

The Havana Act will now ameliorate the path for funds and better medical attention for the over one hundred and thirty American federal government personnel that have been permanently disabled by the cowardly actions of rogue liberticidal regimes. Justice, however, still awaits for the proper American response to these de facto acts of war.      

Julio M Shiling, political scientist, writer, director of Patria de Martí and The Cuban American Voice, lecturer and media commentator. A native of Cuba, he currently lives in the United States. Twitter: @JulioMShiling // Julio es politólogo, escritor, director de Patria de Martí y The Cuban American Voice. Conferenciante y comentarista en los medios. Natural de Cuba, vive actualmente en EE UU.

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