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Oct. 4, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
13:45
Cuba's 'Sonic Weapons' - Real Or Imagined?

Are the Cubans attacking US embassy personnel in Havana with sonic weapons? As relations continue to deteriorate despite no proof, who benefits to a return to Cold War with Cuba?

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Time Text
Cuba's Diplomatic Setback 00:13:04
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams.
Daniel, good to see you.
How are you, Dr. Paul?
Very good.
I'm glad you got over your little spell, and you're doing well.
So good to have you back here today.
But I want to talk about Cuba and what's going on there.
We're expelling Cuban diplomats, and it looks like they're stirring up trouble.
It looks like they're trying to undo some of the things we thought were worthwhile that Obama did.
It was opening up diplomatic relations and embassies with Cuba, and I don't know exactly what's going to happen.
But you've actually had some on-site experience.
While we were in Washington, you actually made a trip to Cuba.
Unfortunately, even then, you weren't leaving a free country because you couldn't even just fly from here and go to Cuba.
You had to go to Mexico in order to make it all legal and above board and go to Cuba.
But that was back in 2003, and you did get to meet with Cuban diplomats.
So that must have been a worthwhile experience.
Yeah, it was interesting.
It was when I came to work for you in 2001, that was the one thing that I really inherited from my predecessor, was your long-term project to help improve relations with Cuba.
And we had really a left-right coalition in the House who were dedicated, the Cuba Working Group, I think it was called, who were dedicated to improving and actually to moving toward where we finally got in 2015 with President Obama, where restoring diplomatic ties and all that sort of thing.
Well, you know, in Washington, I claim that on the big issues, the parties come together, you know, war and Federal Reserve and debt.
But other times, they argue and bicker over it.
But I think that something like this, there was a coalition, and it's difficult for me to understand why, if a president like Obama, he wasn't our favorite president, that if he does something that he fits what we've been talking about and which other Republicans agree with, why the party has to get their back up against the wall and absolutely disagree with him.
And that seems to be what happens.
So we have talked about this a long time, but now it seems to be a reversal of what Obama tried to do.
The embassies were open.
The travel was open.
People were allowed to fly with them in this country.
Now some of this is being reversed.
The travel restrictions are entered into.
Embassies are being grossly reduced.
But it came out of this incident where 21 of Americans, even though there was a Canadian, got sick all of a sudden.
It was sort of a mysterious disease.
And nobody fully explained it.
And even today, they don't know it.
So there was talk.
Were they poisoned?
You know, sonic waves sent in there to do things?
Or could it have been a virus?
And I think all that is up for God.
One thing, though, that I feel certain of is the people who did not like better relationships with China have used this.
They won't let a crisis go to waste.
And all of a sudden, things have gotten reversed.
And we have a president that really has never been in our camp.
I don't know whether he said any good things about relationships with Cuba even in the campaign, but he has not indicated that he's on our side of saying, let's talk to people.
The Cold War is over.
That's old-fashioned now.
But here we are going back and forth trying to sort this out.
And unfortunately, it's going in the wrong direction.
Yeah, Candidate Trump sided very strongly with the neocons when it came to Cuba.
He called the deal one-sided.
He criticized it.
That helped him with some of the Florida delegation, the Rubios and Ross Leightons of the world.
But he's always been very hawkish on it.
But the supposed attacks, very mysterious.
Nobody knows what they are.
Nobody has any idea.
The symptoms of the attacks are wide-ranging from nosebleeds, nausea, dizziness, to severe headaches, mild brain damage, hearing and memory loss, supposedly.
And so it's the question is, was it some sort of acoustic weapon?
They've described hearing things from grinding, blaring cacathany to the sound of crickets, which is a pretty broad range of things.
So no one knows what happened, if it was, as you say, a virus, an attack, or something else.
But as you point out, it was a good crisis.
So therefore, you've got to reach the conclusion before the evidence.
Yeah, and right now, even our own government is not accusing the Cuban government of doing this.
And that might be diplomatic about doing that.
But the Cuban government, I think, wants to resolve this.
I think they like our visitors going to Cuba.
I think they're less communistic than they used to be.
So they've actually even allowed our FBI to come in and investigate to try to figure out what's going on.
They want to know what's going on.
But it is very, very strange whether there's some illicit sonic activity going on.
Some of those symptoms can be explained by a virus.
Not everybody was working in the embassy.
Some were just in a, you know, we're spouses and they live in a hotel nearby and they ended up having a problem.
It doesn't look like it's continuing.
It raised, to me, one of the things that crossed my mind, could this be something similar to Legionnaires' disease?
Remember, they had symptoms that were sort of mysterious.
They finally isolated, you know, a virus on that.
But right now, I don't think they're going to isolate a virus.
But I do know that people can get a virus and have dizziness, and they can have some of these symptoms, and they can have loss of hearing, and it can be permanent, even by a virus.
And when it's narrowed down to that, those symptoms, immediate treatment is very important.
But there's a few other things that went along there that isn't fully explained.
But right now, there's no question about how it's hurting the diplomatic relationship.
You know, first we brought some diplomats home, and then we kicked out a few Cuban diplomats, and now the most recent thing, we expelled 15 diplomats, and they're continuing to go.
And the travel restrictions, because it was announced that there's a travel warning, all of a sudden, I guess when you take people into the country against a travel warning, your insurance protecting those individuals no longer exists.
And the other thing, which I believe this is the case, there are some people who make the case that if you want to talk about relative danger, that right now, if you and I decide to get on a commercial airline and fly to Cuba or any other country in the region, it's probably one of the safest places to go to.
So it's not good that things have been reversed, and I just don't see exactly what's going to happen from this because they certainly aren't paying a lot of attention to our viewpoint.
The other question to wonder, I mean, we don't know.
There can be a lot of speculation done, speculate about a virus.
That might be bolstered by the idea that apparently it's unclear whether all the symptoms that people are reporting are related to the so-called attacks.
Could be a case of kind of mass hysteria.
And if you think about how an embassy operates, and I've had a lot of experience with diplomats over my years, if you think of how an embassy operates in a place like Cuba, you do have a very closed system.
Diplomats don't get around very much.
They don't mingle in with the local community.
They tend to build a real wall around themselves.
So you get a lot of group thinking.
So if you have a couple of people get sick and it's mysterious, and it's understandable, you can set off kind of a psychological, so everything would be attributed to that.
There's one possibility.
But let's say the consensus gets around this idea that sonic waves did this.
Scary, yeah.
Who would do this?
Who has the most interest in doing it?
Do you think the Cuban government right now wants to break total relations with the United States?
Right now, I think they're enjoying our tours.
They're making money, yeah.
So I cannot believe that they would do that.
And I sort of don't think our government would do it, even though they've done some pretty wild and nasty things.
Especially with Cuba, yeah.
Or, you know, the part of the government that is part of the deep state, you know, some of our secret agencies and spy agencies, they do a lot of things our actual government doesn't even realize that's going on.
But who would benefit the most?
And it's really the element that never wanted to have better relations with them.
And of course, the first senator to say this is the reason we really have to crack down was Rubio.
I mean, I don't hear of anybody else thinking that they know all the answers.
At least he was the most outspoken.
And since he represents their view, one way or another, he's delighted.
But what if there's somebody else that we don't know about right now who does it deliberately?
They could do this, and they're unrelated to our government, unrelated to the Cuban government, but related to a group that, you know, for some philosophic reason, want to end this.
And it may be very difficult ever to discover exactly who did it, even if we did know it was a sonic wave.
And the other issue, it's been reported that the first people that come down with these illnesses are U.S. intelligence operatives working in Cuba.
So that raises another issue that we might wonder.
They're involved in covert actions against the Cuban government.
Was it some sort of a retaliation against them?
Could it have been a third party?
Maybe they identified the intelligence operatives that were in Cuba and they launched something, a third party, hardliners on either side.
You know, there are so many factors that can be considered when you look at just what we do know.
And then the big question, I guess, the question for the whole show was: why would you jump to conclusions and start expelling diplomats when we really, you know, the picture is pretty unclear?
Yeah, if it's a health matter, that's not the usual thing, unless it was quickly identified as some rapidly spreading disease.
But there's no charges made that this is a contagious disease.
I mean, it happened, it stopped, that suggests, you know, something, hysterical reactions or some type of a sonic wave or some type of an immediate virus that is not going to spread.
But it's unfortunate because this is not going to be easy to reverse.
You know, it takes a long time to recover from 50 years of sanctions.
And then we have the recovery, but then when the setback occurs, it cancels out.
This might cancel out 50% of what Obama was trying to do because the atmosphere right now is not good, even though all the sanctions have not been removed.
It actually helps our economic competitors because they were way ahead of us anyway.
They were already in Cuba.
But I really believe the Cuban people, and you've met some, the Cuban people would like to see us there, and I believe this government would like to see us there.
So it's unfortunate what's happening.
Yeah, absolutely.
And if I can have a concluding idea, you know, the State Department issued a statement yesterday as to why they're expelling these diplomats.
And we like to talk a lot about hypocrisy and irony on the show when it comes to U.S. foreign policy.
And the reason why it was cutting embassy staff there was the failure to take appropriate steps to protect U.S. diplomats with regard to their Vienna Treaty obligations.
The Cubans have an obligation under the Vienna Treaty to do certain things.
All countries do their signatories.
And one of them is that the property of that country in the other country is their property.
It's sacrosanct.
It's pretty ironic because just this week, the U.S. security moved into a Russian diplomatic space in San Francisco against the will of the Russians.
Total violation of the Vienna Treaty.
We did it totally blatantly, but that's okay.
Not our government.
I'm afraid it was.
Sometimes we hesitate to use the word our and we because it shouldn't be so broad.
But I guess we will not have the final answer here, but the biggest thing is that the diplomatic relationship with Cuba has taken a setback, and we need more people looking at this more objectively, realizing that good relations with Cuba is possible.
Positive Steps Forward 00:00:29
There's been an improvement.
It's a shame that in spite of the fact that it's difficult to say positive things about Obama, if he does something positive, whether it's in Cuba or with Iran, we ought to recognize that we ought to deal with the issues and move in that direction.
And one is more open travel, more open communication, more trade.
That is one of the most important things that we can do to move in the direction of peace and prosperity.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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