Mystery of Sonic Weapon Attacks At US Embassy In Cuba Deepens (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 U.S. victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top U.S. diplomat has called them "health attacks." New details learned by the Associated Press indicate at least some of the incidents were confined to specific rooms or even parts of rooms with laser-like specificity, baffling U.S. officials who say the facts and the physics don't add up.

Suspicion initially focused on a sonic weapon, and on the Cubans. Yet the diagnosis of mild brain injury, considered unlikely to result from sound, has confounded the FBI, the state department and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the investigation. Some victims now have problems concentrating or recalling specific words, several officials said, the latest signs of more serious damage than the U.S. government initially realized. The United States first acknowledged the attacks in August -- nine months after symptoms were first reported.

Comments

Not Cuba

[Dan East]

I commented on this story in the past, and I'll say it again now. It doesn't make any sense that the Cuban government is doing this. They are a dictatorship, and if they didn't want US diplomats there, or didn't want to try and reconnect with the US, then they simply wouldn't do it. For them to try and injure US diplomats makes no sense at all. I believe this is being done by some 3rd party nation to try and cause problems between the US and Cuba. Why? Because they want to maintain the status quo (the US and Cuba not having diplomatic relations) because they stand to gain either financially and / or in regional influence and power. Several South American countries, as well as Russia, come to mind...

From an excerpt from a 2016 article discussing the US restoring some relations with the Cuban Government:

As if that wasn’t remarkable enough, this has occurred with Cuban-Russian relations at their strongest since the demise of the Soviet Union. Russian prime minister Dmitry Medvedev has visited Cuba twice since February 2008 while Vladimir Putin visited in July 2014. Meanwhile Raúl Castro has been to Moscow three times in recent years. Can these two relationships really keep improving in parallel?

http://theconversation.com/cub...

Re:Not Cuba

[Kjella]

However there are a few parties around that are absolutely livid over the idea of relations between U.S. and Cuba being normalized. My money is on it turning out to be U.S.-based Cuban group whose families hated Castro for one reason or another possibly in partnership with counter-revolutionaries still in Cuba. Less likely is someone in Cuba who thinks Raul Castro is betraying the Revolution by engaging with the U.S. But it is possible.

Those people exist. But who of them would think we hate that, let's create a secret sonic screwdriver to give US diplomats hearing loss and light brain damage. I mean whatever is creating this must have gone through a pretty big R&D project with a non-trivial chance of failure. It must have been tweaked and tested pretty well to both be strong enough to cause damage and weak enough to remain stealthy for quite some time. That sounds to me like a secret intelligence/military program, not some ragtag rebels. Even if they stole a prototype, somebody would know and using it correctly would not be easy - look at the rebels in Eastern Ukraine who couldn't tell the difference between military jets and a civilian airliner.

The second thing that doesn't add up is motivation, if you're trying to sabotage US-Cuba relations you'd better not look like a third party trying to do just that. You'd try to discredit or frame Cuba, you might stage some blatant attack like a car bomb or poison their food to say the US is not wanted but this FUD? Let's be honest, diplomats are an archaic leftover from when they were trusted emissaries and negotiators because getting instructions from home took days and weeks. Even if they pulled out physically, the US could maintain normal diplomatic relations virtually. You'd only need a booth to handle physical matters, though you could probably move most things like visa applications online too. The actual embassy is today mostly for show.

My guess is that this is an intelligence project gone wrong. This is supposed to be a form of scanner, picking up on something trying to punch through some countermeasures that are in place and causing long term damage that wasn't caught in testing. To me that's by far the most plausible explanation for why this would exist and why they'd target diplomats in particular. I mean there are probably other ways you could damage economic ties, tourism or whatever that could damage relations but only diplomats would have political information of any real value. Everything else seems a bit contrived, like you could but it wouldn't really make any sense.

CBC also has a story

[Target Drone]

CBC recently had a story on the 5 Canadian diplomats and families affected. They also speculated that since Canada has better relations with Cuba it's unlikely the Cuban government is behind this. The story also mentions that since Russia has a large diplomatic presence in Cuba, has been known to harass foreign diplomats and also has the know how to possibly develop this kind of high tech weapon that they are a possible suspect.