U.S. Embassy in Cuba Starts Issuing Visas Again After 4 Years of Not Doing so Due to Alleged Sonic Attacks

The U.S. embassy in Cuba has resumed issuing visas after more than four years of not doing so due to alleged sonic attacks against diplomatic personnel.

Al Jazeera reported that visas were issued while the island was experiencing an increase in emigration. A Cuban employee told a group of people waiting outside the embassy's consular section in Havana for their appointments on Tuesday, "welcome to the embassy after so much time."

In 2017, Washington closed its U.S. embassy services in Havana, Cuba after U.S. staff and their families suffered from an illness known as "Havana Syndrome."

In 2020, a U.S. government report noted that the illnesses suffered by staff and their families were most likely caused by "directed, pulsed radiofrequency energy."

Many Cubans hoping to migrate to the U.S. to escape the island nation were affected by the closure of consular services in Cuba.

A man whose daughter is in the U.S. told Al Jazeera that they hoped everything goes well as he has been waiting for three years to rejoin his daughter. The man noted that he had not seen his daughter for seven years.

U.S. Embassy in Cuba Issuing Visas

Cubans who wanted to go to the U.S. faced several obstacles, such as being forced to travel to Colombia or Guyana to submit a request.

Others opted to make a long journey through Central America and Mexico to enter the U.S. as undocumented immigrants, according to Voice of America.

In October 2021 and March this year, the U.S. Customs office noted that more than 78,000 Cubans entered the country from Mexico.

The U.S. should authorize 20,000 immigrant visas every year to Cubans under existing immigration agreements. However, the agreement has not been fulfilled.

Cuba has been experiencing its worst economic crisis in almost 30 years, mainly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a decrease in tourism.

Havana Syndrome in Cuba

In February, U.S. diplomats said the Havana syndrome has affected the recruitment in the U.S. diplomatic corps.

According to Eric Rubin, the head of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the Havana syndrome has "dramatically hurt" the morale of the diplomatic corps in the country.

AFSA represents around 17,000 current and former U.S. diplomats and foreign aid workers. Rubin said it is hard nowadays to recruit younger people willing to work abroad due to Havana syndrome. He noted that there was a concern about whether the government would look after them if they got sick from the mysterious illness.

"People have suffered real trauma and real injury, and it has dramatically hurt our morale, our readiness, our ability to recruit new members in the foreign service," the AFSA president said.

In the same month, a panel of technical and medical experts gathered by the U.S. intelligence apparatus found that some cases of the Havana syndrome might be caused by directed electromagnetic energy.

According to Al Jazeera, the experts' findings revealed that a subset of anomalous health incidents (AHI) could not "be easily explained by known environmental or medical conditions and could be due to external stimuli."

The experts noted that it was possible to create concealable devices that would direct electromagnetic energy or ultrasound waves to cause damage to a targeted person using moderate amounts of energy. But the U.S. panel did not clarify if that technology currently exists or which actors may have used it against the U.S. personnel.

A National Academy of Sciences committee earlier said that "directed, pulsed radio-frequency energy" appears to be the most reasonable explanation for the symptoms.

Havana Syndrome causes patients to experience hearing strange sounds, loss of balance, dizziness, nausea, and memory loss. Since the original outbreak of the symptoms, more than 1,000 cases have been reported and studied worldwide.

Many of the cases originated at the U.S. Embassy in Havana, Cuba, beginning in 2016.

This article is owned by Latin Post.

Written by: Mary Webber

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