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Cuba rejects US claim of microwave energy attacks

Wednesday, 16 December 2020 7:11 AM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 16 December 2020 8:32 AM ]

This file photo, taken in Beijing, China, on September 24, 2020, shows a radio wave tower. (By AFP)

Cuba has dismissed a US government report suggesting that American diplomats and spies in the country were targeted with pulsed microwave energy attacks and were afflicted with certain injuries as a result.

The US administration has claimed that between 2016 and 2018, US embassy staff suffering from mysterious ailments in Havana and elsewhere were the target of a secret weapon.

President of the Cuban Academy of Sciences Luis Velazquez told reporters at a press briefing in Havana on Tuesday that the American theory that involved the use of a secret super sonic weapon was "very unlikely."

Velazquez cited a study by the Cuban Academy of Sciences as saying that an earlier study by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine lacked any true scientific credibility.

US spies baffled by what befell diplomats in Cuba

The US intelligence community has not yet managed to come up with a clear explanation as to what, or who caused mysterious injuries reported by 21 US diplomatic staff in Cuba.

The American study, which was commissioned by the US State Department and published on December 6, gave no scientific evidence to prove the existence of the radio frequency waves claimed to have caused the illnesses, Velazquez said.

"Cuba's Academy of Sciences disagrees with the final conclusion regarding the causes of the ailments," the Cuban academy said in its statement, which was read to reporters by Velazquez.

Velazquez complained that due to the lack of communication between the scientists of the two countries, neither the American nor the Cuban side had a clear picture of what had happened to the staff at the US embassy.

"Investigation about these health ailments has suffered from a lack of fluid communication between US and Cuban scientists," he said.

Between 2016 and 2018, dozens of US embassy staff, most of them in Cuba, reported illnesses that included hearing loss, vertigo, headaches, and fatigue, a pattern consistent with mild traumatic brain injury that came to be known as the "Havana syndrome."

Canada, too, said that more than a dozen of its embassy staff and relatives stationed in Havana had experienced similar symptoms to those of the Americans.

A study by the National Academies of Sciences (NAS) claimed that microwave energy in the form of radio frequency that was directed at the embassy staff had played a role in the reported illnesses.