Readers will not have forgotten The Hot Screen’s previous coverage of the mysterious goings-on at the American Embassy in Havana that started in 2016 and ran into the following year. First one, then two, then increasing numbers of American (and later, Canadian) diplomatic personnel experienced a variety of neurological problems, including dizziness, nausea, and memory loss, often reported to have been proceeded by odd noises. The U.S. ended up pulling most of its embassy staff out of Cuba, accusing the Cubans of carrying out attacks on U.S. citizens via an unidentified technology.
Officials speculated that the Cubans may have employed some sort of advanced sonic weapon, or that the country’s surveillance technology somehow interacted in dangerous ways with another electronic system. But as described in “Hear No Evil,” published in the February issue of Vanity Fair, U.S. officials with an interest in pinning the blame on the Cubans dismissed any explanations that did not involve malign intent on the part of that country. And so investigations of how a high-tech attack was mounted continued on, including the involvement of “Jason, a secretive group of elite scientists that helps the federal government assess new threats to national security.” (It is not much of an exaggeration to say that a technological explanation would require that the long-embargoed Cubans had developed a form of weapon so advanced that their American opponents could barely even comprehend what it was, much less how it might have been deployed.)
The mystery was deepened by the uncanny nature of how the victims described their experiences, many of which were described in this ProPublic article from a year ago. Some described hearing what seemed to be cicadas, but louder and more mechanical-sounding. Another described being struck by a beam of high-pitched sound. There were also strange details, like a newly-arrived CIA operative hearing similar odd sounds despite staying incognito in a hotel. Not only the technology, but the clandestine prowess of the Cubans, appeared to be without peer.
As “Hear No Evil” author Jack Hitt argues, though, the political agenda of various elements of the American government — including politicians like Florida Senator Marco Rubio and those opposed to reconciliation with Cuba — spurred the U.S. to persist in the “sonic attack” theory despite the lack of any hard evidence. Although investigators “found that the victims suffered from a wide range of symptoms: balance issues, visual impairments, tinnitus, sleep disorders, dizziness, nausea, headaches, and problems thinking or remembering,” they did not find accompanying widespread head trauma (leading medical investigators to playfully refer to this situation as the “immaculate concussion”).
Hitt provides an alternative explanation that would not only account for the known facts, but would also resolve the issue of the missing mechanism for causing the victims’ symptoms. Recounting the way the symptoms seemed to spread from just one, to two, to increasing numbers of diplomats and their families, he points to a well-known psychological phenomenon that fits this situation: conversion disorder, described as the “rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms among members of a cohesive social group, for which there is no corresponding organic origin.” More commonly (and less accurately) known as mass hysteria, Hitt recounts how there are countless examples of the phenomenon, and notes that the high-stress environment of the U.S. compound in Havana tracks with how the phenomenon strikes “close-knit” groups.
A couple items strike me as particularly persuasive. First, it turns out that the government studies of the symptoms were not at all well done, including the fact that many symptoms were self-reported and turn out to occur widely in the general population (50 million Americans, for example, experience ringing in the ears.). Second, the first patient — a CIA officer referred to as “Patient Zero” — appears to have played a central and outsized role in the spread of the phenomenon. The officers’s description of being beset by sounds seems to have established a template picked up by others; he also reportedly took an active role in urging others to report their symptoms. Additionally, he provides the missing link as to why Canadian diplomats also started reporting symptoms — it turns out that one of the Canadians lived next door to him.
As Hitt points out, though, the fact that Canadians were also affected was eventually left out of the official narrative, as it contradicted the theory that the Cubans were waging attacks against the United States. Indeed, damningly, U.S. investigators early on raised the possibility of psychological explanations, only to preemptively dismiss them without further consideration — which, as Hitt persuasively argues, left the field open for political agendas premised on Cuban malfeasance.
Not noted by Hitt, but certainly suggested by his reporting, is how the conversion disorder of the diplomats stationed in Cuba was in significant respects mimicked by the official American response. This would account for the widespread willingness to believe that the Cubans possess mind-bogglingly advanced technology despite all evidence to the contrary, and were for no good reason attempting to destroy the rapprochement with the U.S. they’d wanted for so long. Of course, the situation is a bit more complicated that this simple parallelism. On the one hand, long before these attacks, Cuba had been the object of mass hysteria on the part of many Americans, who saw it as a canny exporter of revolution and danger to U.S. national security far out of proportion to its impoverished and backward condition. On the other hand, this fear and revulsion has mostly struck me as ginned up for political purposes, whether to appeal to Cuban-American voters in Florida or to more generally bolster American opposition to socialism in all possible forms. This concept of “manufactured mass hysteria” may also be the better description of the behavior exhibited by American officialdom in response to the recent mystery in Havana. Piggybacking off a psychological phenomenon rooted in the very real stresses of diplomatic and espionage postings that inevitably carried the burden of a highly fraught Cuban-American history, elements of the U.S. government seem to have used an episode of conversion disorder to further a long-standing, exaggerated antagonism against Cuba.