Cuba Rejects Study on Alleged Incident with US Diplomats

A research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) compared images of the brain of US officials who reported health problems when they were working in Cuba with those of people in a control group.

Due to the media repercussion of the article, the deputy director of the US Department at the Cuban Foreign Ministry, Johana Tablada, told reporters that the conclusions presented by US and Cuban specialized agencies that ‘there is no evidence of any kind of incident’ are not modified.

Tablada told a news conference at the headquarters of the Cuban Foreign Ministry that the investigation recognizes that the changes detected are minimal, its conclusions are uncertain and it cannot identify their causes.

Washington uses that issue as a pretext to impose increasingly leonine measures of aggression against our country’s integrity, its economy and its people, the diplomat denounced.

She explained that US National Security Advisor John Bolton and the Department of State speak about ‘attacks’ when they know that ‘there have been neither attacks nor deliberate acts against their diplomats in Cuba’.

Tablada pointed out that after two years of much speculation and little information and cooperation, ‘there is not a single reason’ to support the closure of consular services, the expulsion of Cuban diplomats from Washington and other measures.

She asked the US Government to stop manipulating the alleged health incidents against its diplomats in Havana.

For his part, the general director of the Neurosciences Center of Cuba, Mitchel Valdes-Sosa, noted that the article does not provide clear scientific conclusions and the medical results are ‘confused and contradictory’.

It does not demonstrate, contrary to what was speculated and stated in a study carried out by the same university last year, that brain damage was caused in a group of diplomats during their stay in Cuba.

The physician repeated that he does not deny the existence of sick people, but ‘we demand the need to make progress toward coherence explanations from the scientific viewpoint.’

The Cuban expert commented that the only way to clarify the state of health of those affected is through ‘transparent’ scientific debate and the exchange of information.