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One dollar make you happy.
No fine, no happy people.
Havana Syndrome is about things like
espionage, weapons design, neuroscience.
But all those things are subject to politics.
And the political heart of our story
isn't in Cuba or Washington.
It's in the streets of Little Havana, Miami.
We're just passing by in Cuba.
In the old days,
used to have peanut vendors in the street.
Oh yeah.
And there's even a song called
El Manicero, the peanut man.
Eat the peanut, happy people.
One dollar, one dollar very good.
This is Victor Trié,
a Cuban-American historian.
He's giving me a tour of the neighborhood
founded by people who fled Castro's revolution,
including Victor's own parents.
Anybody who can get out gets out.
And yet you still have people, you know,
who go around with the Che Guevara t-shirts
and the pro-Castro slogans
because they fall for that myth of the revolution.
I mean, if the revolution was so good,
this neighborhood wouldn't exist.
Trié says that a lot of these people
had at first supported Castro.
It was only when he began seizing property
and suppressing dissent
and cozying up to the Soviet Union
that many got out while they could.
There was like almost zero communication
between the exile community and Cuba.
The Cuban government wouldn't permit it.
You would have to call an operator
and then wait by your phone
possibly two or three or four days
until they got your relative in Cuba.
They're, you know, basically their KGB
would listen in on the calls.
Any letters that were sent were opened.
They would get to your relatives
with glue on them very visibly.
So the amount of communication was minimal.
Eventually, the island itself
became an abstract memory,
an idea of a place preserved in amber.
To me, Cuba had disappeared.
To me, Cuba could have been in the South Pacific.
It could have been the planet Krypton
that blew up and our parents got away.
But Cuba had not been blown away.
It was still there, just 90 miles offshore.
It could still be recovered
and the exiles could do it with help.
The new Cuban Americans,
unlike most other immigrant communities,
saw America more as a staging ground
than a new home.
They wanted to overthrow Castro.
And to do that,
they set about transforming themselves
into a political force in Florida.
When Havana Syndrome came along in 2018
with its mysterious symptoms
experienced by American spies and diplomats,
it became the latest flashpoint
and a hot topic for one Cuban American in particular,
Marco Rubio, then a senator,
now Secretary of State
and the president's chief diplomat.
People were hurt,
and the Cuban government knows who did it.
They just won't say, for some reason.
Rubio catapulted Havana Syndrome
from medical mystery
to grand political conspiracy.
To understand the power of Rubio's narrative alchemy
and the implications for those trying to make sense of Havana Syndrome,
we need to go way back before the first case,
back to 1959,
when a bunch of young Cuban guys
landed on the shores of Miami.
We wanted to go back to Cuba.
We are the only country that can say that.
We came to this country to go back where we came from.
From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club.
I'm Sam Bunge.
I'm Jennifer Ford, and this is Episode 5, The Lobby.
We knew that we had to fight.
We knew there was not going to be a swimming competition
or any other nation.
I met Humberto Arguelles along with three of his friends
who have all known each other since they were children in Cuba.
They arrived in Miami in 1959,
straight after the revolution,
with one goal in mind,
to take back their country.
My father could not go and fight.
My grandfather could not go and fight.
It was my turn to go and fight.
Still, overthrowing a regime must have seemed like a long shot
to even the most idealistic among them.
We were 18 years old,
so we're not going to plan a revolution on the date of life.
And we left Cuba with five dollars,
literally five dollars on a small suitcase.
They had been in the US for less than a year
when, in the winter of 1960,
word started going around about American-backed training camps
for some kind of covert operation against Cuba.
These men were interested.
It sounded like someone, somewhere, had a plan.
I was an engineering student at Georgia Tech.
This is Rafael Montalvo.
I was an honours student.
I was doing really good.
I had a job.
And I left that.
When I had to make the decision, it was a hard decision.
It wasn't an easy decision.
I went, there's a convent in Georgia,
a Trappist monk convent,
that I went in a retreat there for three days.
The Trappist monks don't talk,
so you have to be quiet for three days for a Cuban.
That's very hard.
That is a...
I can't imagine it.
Torture.
I basically tried to answer this question,
what is my duty here and what should I do?
And I came to the conclusion by myself
that there's only one thing to do is to fight,
and the only place that was serious enough to fight
is the training camps.
So you always needed the US in some...
We needed somebody.
If Satan had come at that time
and offered me a training camp,
I would have gone to the training camp.
Well, it wasn't the Prince of Darkness.
It was the CIA,
who had their own anti-Cuba agenda.
The existence of a Soviet foothold,
90 miles from the Florida coast,
enraged Washington.
And it was in what Defence Secretary Robert McNamara
would later describe as an atmosphere of hysteria
that one of the CIA's most catastrophic plans was born.
They would invade and overthrow the Castro regime.
And these angry young Cuban students
were just the men to do it.
The more grassroots it looked, the better.
It would end in a fiasco,
known after the inlet on the southern coast of Cuba
where they landed,
Bahía de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs.
The way it began seemed serious enough.
The men were picked up in Miami at night,
driven west across the Everglades,
and taken to a private island off the coast.
There, they were subjected to psychological tests,
medical tests, and lie detector tests.
They were given numbers starting at 2501,
to give the impression that there were 2,500 men
in training somewhere else.
In fact, at the start, there were fewer than 100.
The men were shipped around Central America,
first trained in guerrilla warfare,
then infantry fighting, the plan apparently shifting.
In fact, the men were only briefed once they were at sea,
in April of 1961, days from landing in Cuba.
What they weren't told was that things were fraying at the edges.
Expecting to steal into Cuba, under cover of darkness,
on April 17th, the 1,400 Cuban exiles landed in daylight
and under massive fire,
met by 25,000 Cuban troops armed with Soviet weapons.
So, we stopped them. We stopped them completely.
Montalvo says that for a time, against all odds,
they fended off Castro's men.
But then the boats carrying their supplies
were forced to retreat out to sea.
And we run out of ammunition.
We actually run out of ammunition.
We have no more anti-tank mortars left,
and we have no bullets left.
There were paratroopers that had to bury their weapons,
because they didn't have any ammunition.
After three days of fighting,
the men were told to prepare the beaches for landing.
Full air and sea support from the US was on the way.
So, we did that. We cleared the beaches out.
We pushed almost two miles.
The columns of—so the beaches were clear.
This was Wednesday morning, the third day in the morning.
So, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, we're sitting there.
Well, two destroyers came right close to shore,
and they were moving their cannons like that and so on,
and you could see the people in there.
We were so fired up.
And then, all of a sudden, those destroyers turned around and left,
and that was it.
And I was the young one, so I kept saying,
we were ordered to stay here, we stay here.
And one of the older guys says,
Rafaelito, look at that.
And I look, I look at the boats going and said,
oh my God, they're leaving us.
They're not coming in.
I do remember just sending in desperation,
and mayday, mayday, mayday, with our codenames.
Carlos Leon.
Silence on the other side.
They'd been led to believe they would be the advance party,
and that U.S. military support was right behind them.
And they say they could see U.S. Navy destroyers out on the horizon.
But it seemed like the Americans had got cold feet.
Our mind, at that moment, is very difficult to convey.
Physically, you were drained,
because we haven't had sleep or food in about four days.
And then, all of a sudden, mentally,
here is young guys like us,
all of a sudden, without experience,
asking ourselves, where is our help?
And we kept thinking, where is our support to continue fighting?
I was a radio operator.
This is Ernesto Freire.
I heard when the support was offered and,
unquote, give me the coordinates
so we can have artillery fire on them.
When is that going to happen?
Question from our side.
In two hours.
Then I remember time going by,
and communications started again.
Where is the support?
And I say, you're on your own.
Good luck.
I heard with my own ears.
You're on your own.
Good luck.
What these men didn't know was that at this point,
Washington had well and truly screwed the pooch.
It should have been a precision military operation,
originally laid out by President Eisenhower,
who had masterminded the D-Day landings.
But then John F. Kennedy came to power,
and it had gone south in an incredible case
of last-minute jitters.
The point of invasion was moved.
The number of airstrikes was cut,
and the timing brought forward ahead of the men's landing.
For Kennedy, the changes had been about plausible deniability
and a worry that the plan had America's fingerprints all over it.
But the upshot was that the whole world was learning about the invasion,
while the men were still en route to the landing site.
I would have understood, not that I would have agreed with Kennedy,
if he had cancelled it.
Cancel it, OK?
Have the balls to accept your political laws that way,
because they didn't have to die.
Their commander sent out a final, desperate radio message to the CIA
before retreating from the beachhead.
I'm destroying all my equipment and communications.
Tanks are in sight.
I have nothing to fight with.
I cannot wait for you.
How do you jump to the water, swim to the horizon?
Do you go to the mangroves and the swamps?
And do what?
We decided to go to the mangroves and the swamps.
And we had no food and no water,
just the water we carry on our canteen.
And when the water ended, you had to create something.
And it was the mist of the early morning on the leaves.
We would put that into our mouth in order to wet our lips.
We would drink urine.
We would drink even water that was contaminated.
Anything.
You're living without food, no problem.
We ate live crabs.
We ate anything we could find in between.
But water?
My dear.
That's another story.
Some of our people were in small boats trying to get away.
And they were going towards the American ship.
They didn't pick them up.
I saw that.
I witnessed that.
I witnessed the boats.
Yeah.
Heading out and the destroyer going away.
Yeah.
How many died?
Nine.
Nine died.
Why didn't they pick them up?
They couldn't.
They had orders not to.
And that was an extremely frustrating evidence of the, and I don't have a better name, I'm
sorry, betrayal.
The CIA official line is that the fiasco came down to bad decisions made during that last-minute
panic at the White House.
But the veterans we spoke to have spent the years since thinking about those few days while
helping to set up a museum dedicated to the battle, which is where we met.
And they now have their suspicions that there was another plan.
We are not people who believe in conspiracies or any of that.
But being in charge of this museum, and we're in the process of expanding it, and we have
a tremendous amount of attention on it.
We have made an effort to get the history of the Bay of Pigs correct so we can tell it.
And in doing so, we have found a number of coincidences that put together cannot be a coincidence.
We believe now that there is tremendous evidence that the intent was for us to fail.
We had a military plan that was done under the Eisenhower administration by military people
that had a chance of succeeding.
Kennedy changed it, and Kennedy changed it, you know, in March.
This is one month before the invasion.
They believe that the real plan was to set a trap for Castro, and that Castro figured it out.
And I remember perfectly we're being in the dirt, and they were shooting not to kill us.
They were shooting above our heads, and I remember in the dirt still to this day, the head of that group said,
remember that the commander wants him alive.
Why is Castro saying keep him alive?
They show me a picture where you can see those American battleships out on the horizon.
And here is a whole armada behind us, and they never fired a shot.
They left us there to be killed.
Now you tell us why Castro left us alive.
Because he knew that we were going to be the excuse for these people.
There were 15,000 Marines ready to land in Cuba.
Like my uncle told me, you're going to fight for a free Cuba, but you're not going to see a free Cuba.
You're going to be a dead Cuban.
And then the Americans are going to land in Cuba saying they cannot allow a civil war in Cuba.
And they will have their armada out there waiting for that.
And that Fidel also knew that's why he kept us alive.
They were right there.
They were there.
Let me tell you something about his thing.
You read what this says?
My mother showed me this when we arrived from prison.
In Miami newspaper.
This is a picture of you guys training.
Yes.
Look at the date of this thing.
Okay, wait.
So this says end of training.
Yes.
What is the date?
Friday, the 10th of March, 1960.
And when did we land it in Cuba?
The 17th.
April.
April 17th.
Freely distributed in the streets of Miami a month before the invasion.
And what did they say here?
Oh, here's the army that's going to liberate Cuba from communism and ready to go and all that
stuff.
That's the underlying of the picture.
So people asked if Fidel Castro knew about the invasion.
Of course he knew.
This was supposed to be a secret operation.
What secrecy is there?
We can all sit down in here and tell you about things so absurd, mistakes so unbelievable,
that there's no conclusion, but this had to have been done on purpose.
The numbers are disputed.
But over three days of fighting, at least 100 men were drowned or shot dead.
The rest were captured and sentenced to 30 years hard labour.
It was only at this point that the true scale of America's failure became clear to the men.
Not only did they fail to extinguish a communist regime in their own backyard,
they helped solidify a bond between Cuba and the Soviet Union and catapult Fidel Castro onto
the world stage.
There's no way to be worse than this.
This made Castro a hero.
Because he didn't defeat a bunch of young, you know, guys that went there.
He defeated the empire.
Put your mind back in 1961.
Castro at that moment was a very unknown person.
He was just a guy with a beard that came down from the mountains and so forth and so on.
What made Castro big was the Bay of Pigs.
It took more than a year, but JFK eventually managed to cut a deal with Castro.
The release of the men in exchange for $53 million worth of food and medicine.
And at Christmastime 1962, they arrived on American shores again.
We didn't even get even a list of jobs for us to look for.
We were not given any help, a doctor's visit to help our health.
They gave you a $100 bill, remember?
I didn't get the $100 bill.
Somebody took mine because I didn't get the $100 bill.
I've heard that many times, I didn't get it.
Given everything, you might expect a lot of resentment towards the US.
Except that's not what happened.
This is not bitterness that you're seeing.
We are all tremendously fortunate.
Our generation of having been able to come back here and grow a family here and raise a family here.
In the United States, yes, yes.
United States.
Yes.
So we are very fortunate and we will never lose that gratitude or that happiness for being here.
But our parents' life was destroyed.
Our grandparents' life was destroyed.
All our countrymen's life was destroyed.
And that is a cost we carry inside that we will never leave behind.
These men went back to their studies, got regular jobs and settled down in Miami.
But the Cuban exiles didn't forget their dream of overthrowing Castro.
And over the next 60 years, their generation would experience a remarkable rise to power in the US.
The kind of power that would eventually allow them to take hold of the issue of Havana Syndrome.
Today, far from being a source of shame for the US government,
the Bay of Pigs veterans share the stage with presidents as an enduring symbol of US-Cuba policy.
I'm delighted to welcome you to the White House as we honour the Cuban-American veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Brave people, great people.
But the shift to politics didn't happen straight away.
It began in the winter, after the exiles arrived back in America.
Not as students this time, but as battle-hardened militants.
Sometimes they worked alongside the CIA, who continued to cook up wild plots against Castro.
There's a documentary about all the plans conceived by the CIA in Cuba, called 638 Ways to Kill Castro.
You may have heard about the exploding cigar, but you may not know that they tried to poison his wetsuit,
lace his handkerchief with deadly bacteria, or pipe LSD into the studio where he made his radio broadcasts.
Or that they even planned to carry out terror attacks in American cities and pin them on Cuba.
When US attention turned elsewhere, the Cuban militants continued to work alone.
They bombed Cuban shopping centres, government buildings, and even a commercial airliner.
Another time, a cabin cruiser captained by Cuban exiles was picked up by coastguards near Puerto Rico.
The men were on their way to try to assassinate Castro in Venezuela.
A .50 caliber Barrett assault rifle found in the hold was registered to one Francisco Hernandez.
My name is Francisco Jose Hernandez. Most people call me or know me by Pepe.
Pepe wasn't aboard the cabin cruiser, and he was never indicted over the weapons find.
He'd fought at the Bay of Pigs.
But by the 1980s, he was leading the shift of focus away from armed conflict and towards Washington.
I'm not saying that everything else didn't disappear.
Yeah, there were still some small groups that continued to do these things.
But the main of the community started thinking that we had to try to work within the United States for different purposes.
Pepe and his fellow Cuban Americans did not want the US coming to accept a Castro-led Cuba as a fact of life.
What we wanted is precisely that the United States policy toward Cuba was for regime change inside the island.
There's got to be a democratic reform in Cuba.
As long as that doesn't happen, US policy is going to be diplomatic economic confrontation with the Cuban government.
They became aware of another group that had long held powerful sway over politicians.
That group was AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby.
And in AIPAC, the Cubans found a willing tutor.
And they took us to see all the senators in Washington and they introduced them and giving us tips and things.
They learned about raising money and the fundamentals of effective Washington lobbying.
There are two things that you cannot do with a politician.
You cannot make them realize that regardless of how bad they are, you are going to vote for them.
Or no matter how good they are to you, you are not going to vote for them.
You have to work with both parties.
Pepe's organization had particular advantages.
Firstly, they were united, agreed to their terms and they could deliver an entire community all willing to cast their votes on a single issue.
The special appeal of this bloc came down to an accident of geography.
They were overwhelmingly located in Miami-Dade County in the crucial swing state of Florida.
It was the early 80s. Ronald Reagan was running for president and he liked the pitch.
Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party.
He said, you are very active, we are going to help you and you are going to be our friends.
And you are going to vote Republican.
And it actually worked.
Fast forward a couple of decades to November 22nd, 2000, and the site of a violent protest outside a Miami courthouse.
The entire US presidential election had come down to a vote in Florida that was so close they'd ordered a recount by hand.
Now things had turned ugly.
People were trampling on each other to get to the door.
A Democratic aide claimed he was beaten up outside his boss's office.
The protesters were demanding the recount be stopped because their candidate, George W. Bush, had as far as they were concerned, already won fair and square.
It worked.
The count was stopped and Dubia became the 43rd president of the United States.
What many people don't know is that crowd was largely made up of Cuban Americans.
But actually it was the Cubans who really stopped the counting here in the county. It was very good.
And the courthouse protest was the cherry on top of a campaign Pepe's lobby waged against the Democrats, who under Bill Clinton had recently begun to move towards better relations with Cuba.
There always seems to be something, you know, the Cuban American community can latch onto to shut it down.
Vicki Huddleston was the U.S. Chief of Mission to Cuba under Clinton and based in Havana.
The way she tells it, the path to that fight outside the courthouse began on Thanksgiving weekend 1999 with a phone call from the Cuban Foreign Ministry.
I got the call. They say, well, we have an issue. There's a child who's been picked up by the Coast Guard. He's in Miami. Do you know anything about this? No, I don't know anything about this. Never heard anything about this. Well, would you check on this for us?
The boy was five-year-old Elian Gonzalez. He'd been found floating on the inner tube of a tire in the Florida Straits, the only survivor of a group of Cubans, including his mother, who had tried to make it to the U.S. on a raft.
Huddleston learned the boy was now staying with relatives in Miami, and she began to apply for a visa for his father to come and bring him back to Cuba.
That day, all parties were working to resolve the issue quickly and quietly.
But by the next day, the Cuban American National Foundation has gone to the relatives and said, don't send that kid back and we'll help you keep him here. And then the next thing you know, it's a big deal.
Instead, with the help of the Cuban American lobby, those relatives in Miami applied for asylum for Elian in the U.S.
And from here, the saga of this castaway boy came to symbolize the entire toxic relationship between the exiles, the American government and the Castro regime.
When U.S. judges said the boy should go back to Cuba with his father, a Republican Florida senator called for a change in the law to allow him to stay.
It is hard for me to believe that a court in the United States, the freest country in the world, would make a decision saying that they think it's in the best interest of the little boy to go back to Cuba,
a totalitarian country where he will be told by the state what he will learn, what he can speak, what he can believe and what he'll become.
The road by the front yard of Elian's Miami relatives became a gathering point.
When a psychologist announced that the child's situation was a form of psychological abuse, the media went to gin up the crowd.
No, it's not true. That's what they say. Because this is a combination with Castro. That's it.
Can you tell the doctor that the only thing this family has done is give him love and food and take care of him?
It dragged on through the spring as Miami relatives appealed and defied orders to return the boy to his father.
And protesters told reporters they would prevent the authorities from coming to take Elian away by force.
One CBS reporter pulled the last 60 years together, making it not just about the boy, but about those teenagers abandoned on the beach in 1961.
This day is the 39th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Many out here say they felt betrayed by our government back then.
And many here tonight say they felt that same feeling once again.
We're live in Little Havana, Stacey Santos, CBS 4 News tonight.
In the end, the authorities did come and take Elian away by force.
A SWAT team broke down the door, bundled Elian into a blanket and drove him away.
The Cuban Americans let an AP photographer in through the window as the raid was happening.
There's a famous photograph of a Department of Justice SWAT team member with his goggles, his helmet, his long rifle pointed downward,
confronting little Elian Gonzalez in the arms of a Cuban American who picked him up.
It seemed like an incredibly heavy-handed way of…
It's so hard because, you know, you had all these Cuban Americans out in front of the house,
and the Cuban Americans are talking about going in and grabbing him and taking him off to someplace else.
It was a very difficult situation.
Elian's cousin in Miami held up the photograph at a press conference and pointed at Elian's terrified expression.
That right there ain't a smile. That right there ain't a criminal. We are not criminals. My family aren't criminals.
President Clinton tried to explain he'd had no choice but to follow due process.
Did you give the go-ahead for the operation?
Well, I talked to the Attorney General extensively, especially in the last several days, and I supported the decisions that were made.
But it didn't fly. The Cuban exiles felt betrayed again by the U.S. government.
Only this time, they could make someone pay.
Which brings us back to that fight outside the Miami courthouse.
The Cuban Americans decided to punish the Democratic Party for sending little Elian back to Cuba.
And so they organized what they called El Voto Castigo, the punishment vote.
A toss-up election that hinged on the swing state of Florida.
By now, there were more than two million Cuban Americans, almost all of them living and voting in the sunshine state.
The lobby mobilized for Bush, putting Elian's story at the center of that campaign.
And the punishment vote, in fact, lost Al Gore the election. The rest is history.
So that told every presidential candidate to come just how important the Cuban American community was.
It was quite an incredible moment in history where history could have been different in a massive way, right?
Yeah, and that's not the only time, although I think that's the most impressive, but Havana Syndrome, just like little Elian.
They wanted an issue that could propel Trump into closing down our diplomatic relations with Cuba, which has always been a goal of the hardliners.
They'll use anything, you know, other U.S. interests are secondary or less than secondary to their interest in Cuba.
In January 2018, Cuban American Republican Senator Marco Rubio convened a Senate hearing.
The topic, Havana Syndrome.
Its full title, Attacks on U.S. Diplomats in Cuba, Response and Oversight.
In late 2016, staff at the United States Embassy in Havana began complaining of strange noises.
And among the descriptions that they complained of, high-pitched beam of sound, incapacitating sound, baffling sensation,
akin to driving with windows partially open in a car, or just intense pressure in one ear.
With him on the panel was another Cuban American senator, Democrat Bob Menendez.
Together, they were sticking it to Cuba.
It's unfortunate that since the news of these bizarre and vicious attacks broke late last summer,
we have not seen more public outcry against the Cuban government for whatever scope of ownership it has over these attacks.
Even with Trump's rollback of Obama's thought and the shuttering of the American embassy in Havana, it was still not enough.
Expelling a handful of diplomats to achieve parity with the number of diplomats who had to be removed from Havana for safety is hardly a bold diplomatic move.
It's grandstanding. It's performance. It's theatre.
This is Dr Charles Rosenfarb, head of the medical team at the State Department.
He says he was left shaken by his appearance in front of Rubio's committee.
He hadn't imagined they were going to bring this all down on him.
The stories we heard are shocking.
The failure of leadership at the department and at post.
The sluggish reaction to the initial reports of afflicted personnel.
The aloof response of the medical team at the State Department.
Silence from diplomatic security to the rest of the department is simply staggering.
But to say it was an aloof response, I mean, personally that felt, that was like an attack.
I mean, as someone who spent 20 years working in the medical office, you know, the medical people, that's all we care about.
I mean, we go to incredible lengths to get people the care they need.
And our effort was not bureaucratic. Our effort was trying to get them to care.
Back then we had so little information.
So we did the best, and it sounds trite, but we did the best we could with the information we had.
We had no idea what was going on.
No one did. But Rubio was using this hearing to think out loud.
There were flaws with the theory that Cuba was single-handedly responsible for these attacks.
For a start, this kind of technology would be state of the art.
At the Senate hearing, Rubio himself admitted as much.
Dr. Rosenfarb, have you ever seen cases of this outside of an actual blow to the head or something similar?
I have not.
Okay, and that's consistent with everything we've been told.
And the reason why I raise that is because, obviously, this is a pretty sophisticated thing.
Okay, this was not something conducted by, you know, a fly-by-night operation.
Whatever happened to these people happened as a result of some sophisticated technology that, quite frankly, is so sophisticated we don't understand it.
He was playing armchair detective who might have been motivated to carry out attacks like this.
Whoever did this did this because they wanted there to be friction between the United States and the Cuban government.
That would be the motivation behind this.
He began weighing up potential suspects, beginning with the Cuban exiles.
I don't think any credible person on the planet believes that some group of anti-Castro Cubans conducted these attacks in an elaborate scheme to somehow disrupt the Obama opening.
So I don't even want to spend any time on that.
He wondered about the possibility of a rogue element in Cuba who'd somehow come into possession of this weapon and gone behind Raul Castro's back.
He asked the panel, was there any evidence of that?
I do not believe so.
Okay.
And then the last one, and this was the question that was, then you say, well, if it wasn't a rogue element within the Castro government, maybe it was a third country.
Which third country would want to disrupt the U.S. presence there?
And the logical conclusion is Russia and Vladimir Putin.
People have been throwing the R word around ever since Havana syndrome emerged.
Cuba's been Russia's friend in the West for decades.
America only ever really cared about Cuba to the extent that they could be convinced of those ties.
So for Rubio, bringing Russia into the equation solved a lot of problems.
For starters, they would have the money to develop something so technically advanced.
But that didn't mean that Cuba was off the hook.
Rubio says that nothing happens on the island without Cuban intelligence knowing about it.
Cuba, by all accounts, is by far the most heavily monitored and surveilled country in the Western Hemisphere.
Does anyone disagree with that assessment?
It is a police state.
In Rubio's way of thinking, Russia and Cuba are of course in cahoots.
The idea that somehow someone could conduct an attack so sophisticated that we don't even know what it is,
without the Cuban government at least knowing about it, to one U.S. government employee, not to mention 24 over a 12-month period, is outside the realm of reasonable, it's ridiculous.
Actually, we spoke to someone who said that's not quite true.
Yeah, I would be very surprised if they were able to surveil effectively everyone all the time.
It didn't feel like that.
This is Jeremy Lang, a British diplomat posted to the British Embassy in Havana shortly after the health incidents.
We were curious to speak to someone who sat outside the toxic relationship between Cuba and the U.S.
It's not a North Korea, the Caribbean, and I don't think it's got the resources to be anyway.
You know, it's a country that is really struggling in terms of its economy.
You can argue the toss as to how much the embargo impacts that, but the fact is that the Cuban economy is really struggling.
Lang himself struggled to adapt to life in Cuba.
He says the internet was so slow, it would take him half the day to load the homepage of a U.K. news site.
And he heard of people queuing for 12 hours to buy things like house paint.
That's just the reality of life in Cuba.
It's a harsh place to live, you know, and it's very difficult to get hold of basic goods in Cuba.
So, you know, your average Cuban functionary would be probably more concerned about those sorts of things than, you know, being ideologically wedded to the Cuban way.
It's a bit like, sort of, um, Austin Powers, you know, sort of no one thinks about the evil henchmen.
You know, sort of like, you know, just to get through the day, they probably had to queue up to go and get their chicken.
Lang's point is, his experience didn't square with the idea that it would have been impossible for anyone to carry out attacks on American diplomats, because everyone was under surveillance all the time.
I just don't think they had the resources to do that. And I didn't feel like I was being trailed. So go figure.
Yeah. Yeah, if they're not doing it to the Brits, they probably won't be doing it to the Russians.
Were there Russians around?
Yeah, I mean, you saw them around. I mean, I would see them with their families at the beach. Yeah, very much whiter than everyone else. Not that I was particularly brown, but anyway.
Lang's talking about Russian officials posted to Havana. He says that, unlike other expats, they kept to themselves.
There were quite a lot of them, but they wouldn't mix much with, sort of, if you like, the Western cohort. You know, they're pretty, um, they're pretty monosyllabic. They don't really engage in much conversation.
Russia's presence in Cuba was once tied to the Cold War. But even after the Berlin Wall fell, and Russia pulled financial support of Cuba, they kept a foothold there.
The way Lang described it, it was as if there was something proprietorial about the Russians' solemn presence in Havana.
It's got a large embassy. It's this sort of brutalist sword struck into the ground of Cuban soil.
It's almost a statement in terms of the architecture.
What's the statement that that building's making?
It's a statement that, you know, this is what's then Soviet and the Russian government firmly embedded in Cuba, I think. That's the statement.
What sounded like Marco Rubio merely raising the spectre of Russia in order to get an implausible idea over the line, now, in light of speaking to Jeremy Lang, maybe didn't seem entirely far-fetched.
Adam, patient zero of Havana syndrome, has never been able to tell us much about what he was in Cuba to do.
We know that he was there to gather intelligence, but not a whole lot more beyond that.
But we do know that at one point, he went to photograph a military parade to scope out what kind of weapons they had.
He also did tell us that early on in his time there, he observed Russian warships entering the harbour in Havana.
Now, that might have been a show of strength, Russia flexing its muscles.
It happened while we were covering this story.
Around the time President Biden signed a deal to supply Ukraine with arms, four Russian ships crossed the Atlantic and docked in Havana, where they sat for several days.
Back at those Senate hearings, Bob Menendez quizzed the representatives from the State Department about an agreement that Cuba had signed with Russia, right as they were opening their arms to America.
In December of 2016, around the same time these attacks first started, the Cuban and Russian government signed a new defence cooperation agreement, including cooperation on a series of new technologies.
The big question, was the Havana syndrome weapon one of those new technologies?
Has the State Department raised attacks against US personnel in Cuba with the Russian government, for example?
Sir, I think I would, that's a very good question. I think it would be better to address that issue in a classified setting.
The Russian government has repeatedly denied any involvement in Havana syndrome.
But that day, Menendez and Rubio were publicly raising a delicate question.
The America-Cuba relationship was bitter and hostile, but ultimately a sideshow.
And US outrage over health incidents just the latest row and a never-ending spat with a poor Caribbean island nation.
But if Russia was part of the equation, well, that was a whole different ball of wax.
Well, as it would turn out just weeks earlier, something with all the hallmarks of Adam's experience in Havana happened to another CIA agent in Moscow.
So in December 2017, I was the deputy operations chief for the CIA's Europe and Eurasia Mission Center, which is the equivalent of a one-star general in the military.
That's next time on Havana Helmet Club.
The vertigo was the most disorienting. I'd never had that before. I mean, the room was spinning.
There's Russian connections everywhere.
What has been happening can trace its history literally back almost 60 years.
I honestly didn't expect to live this long. You know, I'm sort of surrounded now by a platoon of doctors.
I mean, these people were marked. It's not accidental.
From BBC Radio 4, this is Havana Helmet Club.
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Havana Helmet Club is written and presented by Sam Bungie and Jennifer Ford and edited by Guy Crossman.
Our story editor is Mike Olive and our producer is Larry Ryan.
Original music by Tom Pintons.
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Additional sound design and mix by Peregrine Andrews.
Commissioning editor for the BBC is Dylan Haskins.
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Havana Helmet Club is a Yarn production for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.