Will the US Really Close Down its Embassy in Havana?

By Fernando Ravsberg

HAVANA TIMES — The US government has said that it is studying the possibility of closing its diplomatic headquarters in Havana as a result of the mysterious “Death ray” device, a sonic weapon which would only exist in Cuba and only leaves North American diplomats deaf.

Washington has just revealed its cards in this game, the objective of this attack without names of victims, without medical opinions to back them up and based on a bizarre weapon, seems to have come out of James Bond’s secret arsenal.

Last Friday, Republican senators, among other the powerful Cuban-American Marco Rubio, sent a letter to the US Department of State in which they pressed for it to demand an explanation from Cuba about what happened and proposed to close down the embassy if the Cuban government doesn’t clarify what happened immediately.

Marco Rubio has had a great influence on President Trump, due to the fact that some of the darkest activities of the current administration are being investigated but this Republican Senator, who baptized the sonic weapon: “The Death ray”.

First, they said that only a couple of people had been affected but these numbers then began to slowly grow and now there are about 30 people who are suffering symptoms. Hearing problems developed into brain damage and a sound which couldn’t be heard became a horrible sound which would wake them up.

The change in frequency, making a sound audible, is clearly due to scientists claiming that “There is no way for an acoustic device to cause hearing damage using inaudible sounds.”

“I can’t think of any way that the illness and hearing loss are related to sound,” psychologist Andrew Oxenham of the University of Minnesota’s Auditory Perception and Cognition Laboratory said.

US experts also believe that a weapon that “is audible”, like what has apparently happened in recent “attacks,” is also not very probable, except for in the case that Cuban scientists have been successful where the USSR and USA have failed.

An audible sonic weapon is hard to explain, said Sharon Weinberger, the author of The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World. “You don’t know what you don’t know, but I feel a sonic weapon is very unlikely, they don’t work very well.”

“During the Cold War, the US and USSR attempted to make sonic weapons and failed. The devices worked unreliably, she said, hurting some people but not others. For a non-lethal weapon to be effective, it has to work on everyone,” Weinberger concluded.

“Until we know more, the possibility of mass hysteria is certainly in play,” claims New Zealand sociologist Robert Bartholomew, the author of Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior.

The sociologist said that “based on the scant information that has been disclosed, it is very possible that this group is psychogenic in nature, as most of the symptoms are headaches and dizziness,” that is to say mass hysteria.

He adds that the only case which presents greater damage could be down to other reasons which have nothing to do with sounds: “The most serious case is described as ‘mild traumatic brain injury’, whatever the hell that means, and could be entirely unrelated.”

The bad news about this “Death ray” case is that it is a replica of the media campaigns about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The good news is that they don’t seem to be getting ready to invade Cuba but instead to close down its embassy in Havana instead.