Dr. Mitchell Valdez-Sosa, a Cuban neuroscientist, details how U.S. sanctions cripple Cuban research by blocking spare parts and scholarships, contrasting Cuba's subsidized Biokua Pharma successes with America's expensive drug model. He refutes the "Havana syndrome" narrative as physically impossible functional disorders fueled by propaganda, arguing the U.S. weaponizes these claims to reverse diplomatic gains and execute demographic genocide through economic strangulation that drives youth away. Ultimately, the discussion exposes how American narratives mask political pressure while ignoring Cuba's modest leadership and superior public health outcomes. [Automatically generated summary]
This might be the most strangely locationed-based intro that we've ever done.
I am Brace.
I'm producer Young Chomsky.
And we are the TrueNOT podcast.
But we are recording not from our usual place in a studio or on our trips in a hotel room.
We are in Miami Beach, right across from, I'm looking at the map right now, Allison Island.
Do you see those houses right there?
Yeah.
Pretty crazy.
My grandparents came through Allison Island.
They changed their names.
We were watching shirtless ancient gentlemen twist themselves around pipes and bars at the workout centers in this little park.
I mean, to be honest, we're on the side of the road.
Yeah, we're on the side of the road.
We were going to record this on the beach, a little bit of waves lapping in the distance.
But unfortunately, all the beaches are owned by hotels.
And the parts that aren't have no umbrellas even to rent.
Plus they're very sandy.
But you're neurotic.
It's a beach.
I know.
It's not that I'm surprised that the beach is sandy, but that just makes it difficult for recording.
These things are, these things, everything is dealt with.
You'll be able to hear the sand.
People will complain.
Well, here is the second episode of our little trip to Cuba.
I am so fucking tired.
I was up all last night working on something.
This one is a little bit different.
This is an interview with a neuroscientist, Dr. Mitchell Valdez-Sosa, director of the Cuban Neuroscience Institute.
And also their top researcher into Havana syndrome.
The interview kind of came about a little bit randomly.
We were hanging out at the Belly of the Beast office for a sec.
He was just there.
We're like, oh, we'll talk to him.
And I found him quite charming.
He was great.
Yeah, great guy.
But the issue of Cuba and drugs and scientific research has been a major one.
Obviously, that is something that the government has been really spending a lot of resources on since kind of the beginning of the revolution.
I think he talks a little bit about it in this interview.
And it's kind of one of their main things right now, like bioscience research, drug research.
And we wanted to talk to the good doctor in order to explain what that's like, working under embargo, but trying to get somewhat high-tech stuff done.
And so I think it's a pretty interesting one.
Yeah, and just to provide a bit of a mental image, I would like the audience to picture every time Mitchell was making a point as he would kind of reach the crest of the sentence, he would kind of reach out like he was going to poke you in the knee and just like just stop short.
It was a little bit of like God giving life to Adam.
It was a bit incredible, actually.
I've never encountered a physical presence during a podcast interview such as this.
And I think I might start doing this because every time he would make this point, he would sort of roll his hand and the hand would tumble closer to my knee.
And my knee, this sounds a bit weird, but you know what I mean?
My knee is sort of braced in anticipation, but then he doesn't connect.
He comes quite close and then doesn't connect and then withdraws the hand.
But incredible energy stamina on this guy.
Fidel's Generous Computer Offer00:11:22
He didn't need water.
He didn't need a break.
No.
And I was like, do you want some fucking water?
He's like, no.
Older guy.
So quite an inspiration intellectually and physically.
Yes, yeah, yeah.
I love the guy.
Yeah, I don't know if there's much more to say about it.
It has been a whirlwind 24 hours here.
But enjoy the interview.
Mitchell, thank you so much for joining us.
It's a pleasure to be here.
You have an unusual accent, I got to say.
I don't know if that's rude of me to say.
No, probably, yeah, you're right.
But you were originally from Chicago.
From Chicago, yeah.
And you moved here at 11 in 19, what was it?
16?
61.
Good God.
So that's sort of the reverse pattern for many people, yeah.
What made your family move here?
Well, my father wanted to contribute to the development of Cuba.
In fact, he contributed to the 26th of July movement in Chicago.
He was a member of the committee there of the 26th of July.
They would collect funds for Fidel's movement, guerrilla warfare.
And some of his father-in-law didn't want him to go come.
Yes.
But he wrote a letter.
It was published in a book a few decades ago where his response was, what is needed?
Do I have to take materials for the surgery rooms?
What medicines?
He was coming anyhow.
And he was, I think he did a good job here because he created one of the first obstetric maternity hospitals at high level.
The first newborn intensive care unit of Cuba was created in his hospital.
He was professor at the university, trained a lot of doctors.
So he did a lot of good work here, and he was very proud of it.
And we were proud of him too.
Is your family Cuban?
Cuban.
Cuban.
Yeah, it makes sense.
And my mother was a teacher, and she taught in several schools.
She was the director of the Abraham Lincoln Language School.
That was a school for teaching languages.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not just Cuban, but all different languages.
French, she was the director there.
And she also taught.
And she would teach English and teach foreign or Spanish.
So she did a lot of good work.
I will say those are the two most Cuban jobs I can think of, which is doctor and teacher.
Right.
And so it sounds like you admire your parents quite a bit.
You also became both a doctor and yeah, I became a doctor, but it was very funny because I was very interested in technology.
Yeah.
And I was always doing work as a medical student in research.
Yeah.
And my father sort of had this thing that he wanted us to be clinical doctors.
He's like, how come you never look at anybody's tummy?
Exactly.
And he would say, okay, when your wife is pregnant, let's see if some of those computers you're working with is going to examine her.
But it's not, surely it's not common for the husband to examine his own wife.
No, no, he was saying that it was going to be a doctor, a human.
Yes, yes, because we began working with computers very early.
Interesting.
And do you know who was the person that introduced this to us?
It was a professor from NYU, Professor Irvin Roy John.
This is a guy that started visiting Cuba in the 60s and kept up a scientific collaboration for us for decades.
That must have been quite difficult.
Yeah, it was difficult.
But for Cubans, it's the other side of the coin, you know?
The U.S. is not only aggression, not only blockade, not only economic sanctions, but they're very decent people that want to work with Cuba.
And he introduced us to the use of computers.
In fact, he managed to collect funds and he bought an analog computer.
These computers that sum things up with capacitors.
Is it like one of those punch card kind of computers?
No, no.
It was really analogical, you know, the electrical activity would go into the brain and it would average it.
And it was an old Cat 400, that's the name, very first computer of its kind that came to Cuba.
And it had a little plaque that said to our Cuban friends from their American brothers.
And it was something funds he collected with scientists and they bought it and they gave it to us.
And that was the initiation of research in Cuba in the use of computers for medical diagnosis.
Yeah.
Because, well, I studied medicine and then I went into the special program.
There was a call by Fidel, who was always promoting science, education.
And, you know, Cuba had carried out this anti-illiteracy campaign so everybody could learn to read and write.
That's the famous thing.
They sent everybody like, you got to go to the hills, teach all of you.
All my cousins, when I came back to Cuba, all my cousins were teaching in the countryside.
They were very excited about it.
And then we had the battle of the sixth grade, was called, which was everybody tried to educate everybody so they had at least six years of primary school education.
And then there were these studies at night for workers so they could become professionals, university graduates.
Universities, we had three before 59, and then they started mushrooming around.
And in 1965, Fidel created the National Research Center.
It was a nursery for other research centers.
And then, so I went into this research center, which was it covered all areas of science, but it was acted as an incubator.
So groups would be created there.
They would do their research, start growing, and then branch off into a different building.
And over 30 centers came out of there, 30 research centers.
So Cuba had no modern research center before 1959.
And it now has about 200 research centers.
Now, the interesting thing is that the professors were not only Cubans, but many Latin Americans came to help Cuba.
People from all over the country, from all over the continent, people who were progressive.
And I had two Chilean professors and a Mexican professor.
And these people trained us in scientific research.
Many of them had been trained, you know, in Europe, Oxford, Sweden, and they brought their knowledge.
So now that Cuba has helped so many countries in South America and Latin America with their doctors, I'm always saying that we're paying a debt of gratitude because they came and then not only helped us create the research centers, but they also taught in the medical schools and helped train doctors.
Yeah.
So Roy John, very romantically, wanted to donate computers so we could do studies on brain development of children and compare children that had malnutrition, some sort of obstetric trauma.
And he offered his computers to Cuba.
And then it turned out that he couldn't bring them because we're the enemy.
He's trading with the enemy.
Of course.
And so we started a study in Barbados that we worked for.
We've been working for many years with Professor Janina Galler from Harvard, studying the long-term effects of brief periods of malnutrition.
And because they're lasting effects.
And then, well, Roy John had a whole night talking to Fidel.
They were drinking coffee, talking, and his son was there, and he fell asleep, you know, in a sofa.
And the idea was he's going to bring the computers.
But after he left, Fidel called a group of university professors and said, Can we make a computer?
And they said, yeah.
And The government gave them money, bought them some airplane tickets, and they went off designing the computer on the trip.
They went first to London, and then they finished in Japan in this market called Ahikabara, where you buy to build a computer.
Yeah.
You can buy electronic parts, right?
And they were designing, and they built the first Cuban computer.
It was equivalent.
It was called Sid docientos uno ah, but it was equivalent to a P PDP-9.
So we started our work when Roy returned and he was flyback.
He said, wow, you guys are incredible.
And we started working, studying, you know, brain development in children, hearing loss in children using this Cuban computer.
Of course, after a few years, when the whole thing exploded, you know, and there was all these cheap electronics from Southeast Asia, we switched to concentrating on software development.
So that's a little of the history of my center, which was another center that branched off from the National Research Center.
It's the Cuban Center for Neuroscience.
So what made you, just even just a little bit about you?
I know that we're talking about neuroscience here today, but what made you interested in neuroscience in the first place?
Because the one neuroscientist that I know has got to be the craziest woman I've ever met in my life.
And if she hears this, I don't mean that as an insult.
I love her to death, but I mean, it's really.
We always joke that the people that are working with us are not all, you know, they're not all there.
You hear that, Marianne?
It's your fellow neuroscientists saying it.
And well, I heard some conferences and there was this brilliant, you know, a Mexican professor.
And they were, and I loved the nervous system in classes, you know, when I was studying medicine.
Yeah.
And the research program was they were thinking, applying computers to decipher the signals of the brain and see if we could detect people that were ill.
In fact, in 1979, there was this review article that was published in Science.
You know, it's a very important journal.
Oh, I know.
With a Cuban co-author, my twin brother, because my twin brother, Pedro Vardez, is in this together with me.
But your twin brother is also a neuroscientist?
And we're both neuroscience.
But he's more of a mathematician than I am.
I'm more an experimentalist.
So we say that we have four brain hemispheres working together.
But he does the more mathematical part.
I do the more experimental part.
And these are exciting times because in the same period, the Center for Genetic Engineering was created.
The Finlay Institute that did an amazing thing in the most difficult moment of the U.S. blockade, what the U.S. calls embargo, they made a vaccine against meningitis B.
They were very few because we had an epidemic that was raging across the country.
Everybody was scared for the kids.
And they made this vaccine, vaccinated all the children, and the epidemic disappeared.
And just a year after, year and a half after, Brazil had the same problem.
Genetic Engineering Amidst Blockades00:03:14
And Cuba sent them the vaccines and they managed to control the epidemic.
And this is an example of how Cuban science can help other countries and help its own people.
But it's been very difficult working.
And it's getting more and more difficult.
Well, that's one thing I wanted to ask you about because neuroscience, from what I know about it, it takes a lot of equipment.
And the one thing that the U.S. really does, I guess now it's changed a little bit with especially China's like high-tech manufacturing.
Why can't I think of the word industry?
But like a lot of that sort of like imaging equipment is built in the US or at least designed in the US or would be subject to the.
No, we have to buy like say European equipment.
Yeah.
But it's getting more and more difficult because the money has been drying up.
Yes.
Yeah.
You know, the U.S. government has systematically searched for every source of income to the country and is trying to cut it off.
So if we exported, you know, medical services, they've convinced the world that they will be sanctioned.
Yes.
Even people in the ministries of health of countries will be sanctioned if they hire Cuban medical brigades.
I saw the Jamaicans just.
And they're cutting.
And then Honduras kicked out the Cuban doctors that were in the areas where the local doctors don't go.
Cubans work in the countryside.
They're used to working in hard conditions.
And they were contributing to the health of these countries.
Tourism.
The United States has done everything to scare off tourists.
I know.
If a European comes to Cuba, he has problems getting this automatic visa.
And so many friends of mine have said, I'm not going to Cuba now because I'll have a problem with the U.S.
Well, I want to ask you about that specifically as somebody in your field because everybody I've been talking to, I've asked them, like, how is the sanctions and the blockade affected you just in your day-to-day life in a way that like somebody who might know about the blockade wouldn't really think of.
So like in your research.
I can give you one clear example.
Yes.
We buy equipment in Europe.
Yeah.
And when we go to buy the spare parts, they won't sell us the spare parts, you know, for the repair parts because they say they're afraid of getting into trouble with the U.S.
This has happened with a German company, for example.
We bought equipment to manufacture purses for old people because Cuba population is getting older.
And I spoke with the vice president of this very big company and he says, I'm sorry, I'm ashamed.
World commerce shouldn't be like this.
but we have a lot of business in the U.S., and we fear the sanctions.
Well, it strikes me as...
But I can say an additional thing.
We need to move money around to buy things.
Of course.
And the banks are always cutting off because they say, oh, you're sponsors of terrorism.
So the United States is systematically trying to cut off any source of income to Cuba and also make any kind of financial operation possible and discourage investors.
The whole world, you know, the whole, let's say, global south, the only way it can develop is getting direct investment.
And they're afraid of coming to Cuba.
Healthcare Struggles and Sanctions00:15:14
We're now negotiating patents of ours that we have for new drugs related to Alzheimer's disease.
It's a big problem for the whole world.
I know.
And people in the UK are saying, well, how will the U.S. sanctions affect us?
So getting additional funds, because there's a moment when a research center cannot continue the development of a drug.
It has to go to some company or it has to raise risk capital because clinical trials are very expensive.
They're afraid.
So the lawyers that are advising the people we're talking to are recommending be careful because the U.S. sanctions can affect you.
So this is, I want to talk about the Alzheimer's drug because I have family experience with Alzheimer's ongoing.
We don't need to get into it, but it's quite difficult.
And I used to, when I was younger, I volunteered at a Alzheimer's clinic for a few years.
I worked there later.
It's a really, it's a terrible discussion.
My mother lived almost to 100 years.
She died, had just a few months to get, but the last two years, she had Alzheimer's.
Yeah.
And she didn't recognize it.
It's very, it's very, it's very hard.
It's hard to even explain to somebody to have a family member that you've known your whole life or most of your life, just not know who you are.
And kind of pretend because they mask and stuff like that.
Terrible, true.
You know, there is, you guys have been working on a lot of Alzheimer's research here, and there is a drug that shows problems.
There's one that's the most advanced of the drugs that already has been approved through using Cuba.
What does it do?
It acts on these receptors in the brain that dampen down the inflammation.
In Alzheimer's disease, you get deposits of these toxic proteins, betamyloid, and you have tau is another one, but you also have a lot of inflammation.
And it's like a feedback circle, more inflammation, more deposit of betamyloid.
And this drug, Neroep, what's called, is administered through the nose, goes directly to the brain, and it acts on eritopoietin receptors.
And it controls cell death, dampens cell death, dampens inflammation.
But that's only one of the four drugs we're working on now.
You know, the idea in Cuba is not to put all our eggs in the same basket.
Because dementia and Alzheimer's is probably not one disease, but a collection of diseases.
For example, when Cuba had to, you know, confront and had to fight the pandemic, COVID epidemic, it set off five vaccine projects simultaneous.
Three of them reached the final stage.
Others, COVID disappeared, you know, so we couldn't test them.
And the three were very successful.
And we managed with Cuban vaccines to vaccinate all our population.
And the same thing we're doing, we're doing the same thing with Alzheimer.
We're working on three.
And my center has produced one, which we're testing in several countries, working with France, Mexico, other countries.
And I'd like to make a comment related to the embargo.
I went to the U.S. a year and a half ago, and I visited several universities.
I talked about these drugs.
A very famous neurologist said, if any one of these drugs works, it's going to be a game changer.
And people wanted to work with us, but then they were scared off by sanctions because our friend Narco Rubio, no, he and his, you know, his gang were proposing that anyone that has scientific collaboration with Cuba will not receive federal funds.
And that's the principal source of funding.
So these people had experiments in their mind.
Let's do this.
Let's do that.
They were scared off.
So this is another effect of the embargo.
So this is one of the things that you encounter a lot when people talk about the U.S. healthcare system.
I assume of anybody, you would know that having both lived there and also being somebody who would interface with this kind of thing, it sucks.
And the whole thing is that like, okay, well, prices for drugs have to be really expensive because that funds the research.
And we wouldn't have cutting-edge research if you didn't pay.
I know that's the argument.
Yes.
But a great part of the research is funded by federal taxes.
So people are paying twice.
They're paying their taxes and then they're paying the prices.
In Cuba, it's very interesting.
We have a system which is centered on the organization to which my center belongs to, which is called Biokua Pharma.
It's a big state organization, conglomerate.
And we manufacture and sell at subsidized prices to people all the basic medicine.
This has been failing in the last few years because we don't have enough income in the country to buy all the raw materials.
But the idea is you can run a pharmaceutical industry, supply the needs of the population, and you don't have, if you're not bent on getting rich, you can help a lot of people.
In fact, five years ago, six years ago, Cubans that live in Miami would come to Cuba, buy the cheap Cuban drugs, and then take them to Miami to sell because they were subsidized for the Cuban public.
Truly, we had over 300 of the basic medicines produced in the country.
I met an American group of tourists to Cuba that were visiting centers.
And they, when I explained this to this, they said, why didn't you privatize it?
And, you know, the mindset that things have to go private and that they have to run on profit, that doesn't agree with the idea of reaching, you know, everybody having access to good health care.
God, yeah.
It is one of those things that really kind of falls apart, especially with the Cuban example because that is like… But, of course, I think the whole idea of many of the things that the U.S. government is doing, and it used to be more or less, let's say, a neutral government held hostage by the Miami guys.
Yeah.
But now it's different because I think there's a symbiosis between, you know, there's a connection between Rubio and the president is to crush the Cuban example.
And that means making our health system fail.
And if you don't have enough money to buy what you need in the hospitals, we had an excellent health system.
You know, COVID epidemic, Cuba probably has the lowest mortality rate of all the hemisphere, you know, North and South America.
And a lot of things contributed to that.
For example, Cuba vaccinates 98% of its children with homemade vaccines.
The whole battery.
That means that all these childhood diseases are practically absent.
For example, hepatitis B. Children are vaccinated and it's disappeared in children.
But I remember when Chancellor Merkel was visiting Joe Biden, and unfortunately, I think Biden didn't study the problem.
He started saying that the U.S. would donate vaccines to Cuba if it was distributed by not through the government, but through other kinds of organizations.
It's one of those things that you hear kind of like a lot from guys like that is that the government's hoarding medicine, but they're like, well, then what are they doing with it?
What's the point?
No, no, no.
The point of having a bunch of vaccines.
But the thing is, first, we didn't need the U.S. vaccines because we made three Cuban vaccines.
And we vaccinated all our populations.
Second, our system for vaccinating through the government-organized health system, which is free for everyone.
They have to pay.
It goes, you know, national hospitals, provincial hospitals, municipal hospital, polyclinics in each neighborhood, and family doctors.
We reach everyone.
So if anyone wants to distribute something, medical supply of any kind, that's a very efficient system.
In fact, when it's needed, we recruit, for example, my center, we have a clinical research area, which we turned into a vaccine center.
You're making your dad proud there a little bit.
So we contributed also, so for the neighbors, the neighborhood and other centers nearby, they would come and this clinical research area vaccinated against COVID.
So this idea that the Cuban government does not take care of its people is a message which is used to justify aggression against Cuba.
Because I was embarrassed for Biden, you know, how many people were.
How can he talk of something that's so absurd?
We have a higher percentage of child vaccination than the U.S.
And it's very efficient.
It goes down into the neighborhoods.
It's free.
And people in Cuba, we have a very non-existent anti-vaccine movement.
And one of the things that contributes is that people don't see the medical system as a money grabber.
I mean, it's something they've had all their life for free.
They trust their doctors.
And I mean, maybe two or three guys intoxicated with the internet.
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.
My center has 360 workers, and only one guy who spends all his young guy spent all his time in the internet said he didn't want to be vaccinated.
You guys have those too?
Very rare cases.
We got a lot of those guys.
I know, I know.
But very rare cases.
Most Cubans, I think, know how to discriminate.
Yeah.
And so, so I think the thing that saddens me is that there's only one line of message and different forms being sent to the American people.
And it's that the Cuban government is corrupt, doesn't take care of the people, that they're stealing things.
And this is very far from the truth.
Any Cuban leader, any Cuban official, lives a very modest life.
The Cuban people are intolerant with corruption.
You still get corruption here and there, but the government, it's a complete design of the health system.
And for example, our industry, the Ocugua Pharma, is to produce at low prices.
In fact, we're suffering because we would like to develop new things, but our first duty is we manage to export, then we take that money and we buy the raw materials to produce medicine for the people and sell it at subsidized prices.
So I guess this is the thing I'm wondering about: it seems like, especially with this year, things have been tough since COVID.
It's been very difficult since COVID.
And especially since, there was this sort of like the détentes with Raul Castro and Obama.
And then it became, of course, Trump got in and just tossed that all away.
But it's gotten worse and worse and worse.
And then COVID hit and it did a number on everywhere, but it did a number on Cuba and economically.
And then now this new squeeze.
I mean, is that even I think this new squeeze is an extreme, you know.
First, declaring an oil blockade, because it's true, there are no battleships.
Well, there are battleships all around us, U.S. Navy, but the economic menace of tariffs and sanctions is enough to scare off countries.
Yes.
And this is something that's never been seen.
One country strangling another and trying to cut off its oil supplies.
And it doesn't stand to reason.
If the Cuban government is so terrible, why do you have to do this?
Well, I think it's, I mean, it's obvious.
It's just to be like, well, look how terrible they are.
They can't even keep the lights on.
Right.
Because, you know, that's the message.
But you have to be, you know, very dumb to not understand that the lights are off because of the U.S. sanctions.
Well, I mean, I just, and this is maybe, this sounds almost like a banal point, maybe, but like, it must be pretty hard to just do your job in this environment.
Well, we try to adapt.
For example, my center, what we're doing, we started working shorter hours so people could get home early.
And we've divided the whole workforce into different categories.
People that could do work at home.
We learned a lot during the COVID epidemic.
People that live nearby can come working, walking because we don't have, there's no fuel for transportation.
We identified all the electrical motorcycles in the center.
And now everybody has an electrical motorcycle, has to bring somebody else.
And we're simply adjusting to keep on fighting because we're used to this U.S. aggression.
Now it's obvious, but it's the same thing that's been happening for years.
For example, we try to get scholarships to train our neurologists, our scientists, neuroscientists.
And we go to the International Brain Organization.
It's UNESCO-sponsored United Nations.
You go to the webpage and you can check if you want.
And it says, if you're from Cuba, we cannot supply you with grants because the U.S. sanctions will make bank transcessions.
And this is a U.N. organization?
A UN organization.
That's right.
And so Cuba is that they're, I mean, Cuba can have many defects.
Our system has to change.
The way we run the economy is changing and has to change.
But if there's anything that's good, it's education, science, medicine.
You know, Cuba has had programs of massively publishing books for people to read.
Yeah.
And the U.S. is trying to destroy that.
So they're trying to obliterate any vestige of all these achievements of Cuba because I think they fear the example.
They have the idea that the whole world has to be a replica of the U.S.
But worse.
But the problem is a replica of the U.S. in the third world, in the global south, it means a lot of poverty and hunger for a lot of people.
Yeah, it's like fucking Ecuador.
You know, exactly.
Exactly.
Or like the other part of the world.
If they're so worried, you know, if they're so worried with migration and people coming in, don't make the world worse for the rest of the world.
Well, that's the whole thing.
I mean, obviously the U.S. has, you know, since the revolution had a somewhat different approach to Cuban immigration than to other nations or immigrants from other countries.
But even now, I mean, there's been so many people that have left.
It's like a million, two million.
This is what I call a demographic genocide.
Migration, Poverty, and Demographics00:06:00
Interesting.
Explain.
I'll explain.
If you make life extremely difficult, if you try to ruin the economy and then you open the doors to immigration for Cubans, you're siphoning off a sector of the population.
And they say, no, they're fleeing Cuba.
Well, how many Ukrainians left Ukraine?
Yeah.
Because when you're in a war zone, a lot of people try to protect their family.
This is a war zone.
So people that are migrating not necessarily disagree with the achievements of the revolution.
And many of them, I know a lot of them, that are proud of that, but they want to live in better economic conditions.
So the United States, by opening migration from Cuba and choking the economy, are siphoning off a lot of young people.
And this is demographic genocide.
Well, it's been crazy to see, actually, because again, I was here 12 years ago.
And it was notable this time.
I've seen just a lot less young people.
I mean, you can even see it on the street a little bit.
It's really something.
And this is, you know, it reminds me a little bit of, you know, in Gaza, for instance, they flatten the entire city.
We're not even talking about the people that they've killed.
We're talking about they flatten the entire city.
There's no industry.
There's not like a building in most of most of it.
And they say, okay, well, we might build these apartment buildings in the Sinai and you can move there or you can stay in Gaza in the tents.
Yeah, you know, this is very interesting because first Cuba already has a demographic structure, pyramid, which is inverted, which means the age groups are few people are being born because a lot of women are professionals.
People have less children.
The same thing is happening in the whole developed world.
That's a big world living and people are living longer.
Thanks to social conditions, medical health care.
And so we already have an inverted pyramid.
It's being accelerated by the U.S. policies.
Yes, because it's the people who leave.
When I started reading about Gaza and I saw how the media struggled to really what was happening, there was like this clamp due to the big, strong Israeli lobby.
Yes.
Right.
And they would say, oh, five people died according to the Hamas-led Ministry of Health.
And then you can see, but the truth broke out at the end because it was so horrendous what was happening.
And the public opinion flipped.
I feel that we have exactly the same situation in the United States and in other countries with respect to Cuba.
Well, this is something that is so, I guess, maddening about this entire situation because there is, like you mentioned, this is almost a unique situation where the U.S., because of its almost unique place in kind of world history, has this kind of ability to say that if you do business with Cuba, if you're, you know, if you're a Frenchman and you want to send a Euro to an Austrian and you put Cuba in the description, even though you're saying Euro, you'll get your account deleted.
It's this kind of like complete control, unprecedented, against this tiny little island nation.
It is just, it is outrageous.
And the oil thing, I mean, it's just the other thing I think has only one good thing.
The mask has been taken off.
Yeah.
They've, for years, I heard Michael Rubio speaking in Congress.
What blockade?
There's no ships blocking.
That's the smart little trick.
And that's so hypocritical.
And I think that the problem is there's a clamp also on news about Cuba.
Anything you read in a major U.S. newspaper is either semi-neutral or very against Cuba.
There's no views of millions of Cubans that support their country, that love their country.
Some of them may be enthusiastic with the government, some may be critical of the government, but they love their country and they would like to be left alone.
The voice of those Cubans is not being heard.
Yeah, I mean, this is, I mean, it's also just like, I mean, it's, to me, I just don't understand how anyone stands it, right?
Like, if I was, for instance, even if I was some right-wing Miami Cuban or whatever, right?
Maybe I have a few cousins left on the island, but you know, I've got my car dealerships outside of Tampa or whatever now.
I still don't want people, my, you know, my countrymen who I supposedly come to the rescue.
There's some voices for you.
Some people have been hearing, you know, YouTube and the media, Facebook, whatever.
Some Cubans are saying to the other guys, you know, the ones that are very vocal in their support of Trump, how can you do this to your family members?
Yeah.
How can you do such a cruel thing?
And the problem is, I guess the majority of Americans do not realize what's happening because most Americans are decent people and wouldn't like, you know, they'll be very ashamed of their government when they understand what's happening.
This is maybe the most generous guest we've ever had on the show.
I would love to agree with you, and I probably do on some days, but some days I don't.
I want to switch topics a little bit, maybe a little bit radically, to something that you have quite a bit of experience with, which is one of the few diseases, syndromes named after something in Cuba, which would be Havana syndrome.
We have been talking about Havana syndrome in the show for a while.
We actually have a Havana syndrome episode planned that will come out later than this.
This is sort of impromptu.
But you looked into this and you actually have the ability to because of your scientific training, but also, I guess, would say unprecedented access perhaps to the streets of Havana.
The Mystery of Havana Syndrome00:14:15
Can you explain to me what happened from your perspective?
Or what happened?
What does the U.S. government say?
And then, sort of, what did you find out?
Okay.
This is something that, well, we've been looking at for some time because it was used during the Trump administration to ramp down exchanges, expel people from the Cuban embassy in Washington, and serve as a motivation for the change of direction of what was happening with Cuba.
We were very surprised about this.
And we studied carefully everything that was published about it.
And things didn't fit together.
I mean, we read these reports in the newspaper, and they were talking about sonic weapons.
Impossible.
To harm somebody's ears or brain has to be a sound so large, so loud that everybody in the city would hear it.
That's the thing.
I remember when I first heard about this, it seemed so science fiction to me.
Because you would need some kind of speakers that, like, I mean, maybe the Roland Stones left them here or something, but you know, you need some kind of speaker.
They are sonic weapons, but they're used to disperse crowds.
And like LRADS, they use them after that.
Okay, so that's that.
We immediately said this can't be.
Then they started speaking about different rays that are more invisible.
Rays?
Yeah, rays like infrared rays or ultrasound beams and microwaves.
And we created in the Cuban Academy of Sciences a work team to try to examine what was happening because the Cuban government initially said, oh, maybe something is, maybe someone that wants to mess up this tent between Cuba and the U.S. is trying to harm U.S. diplomats.
So the Cubans initially, the Cuban ministry, I spoke to an official, the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations, they said, we have to look into this.
But then things didn't fit in because people, I mean, a lot of people started reporting.
It was like contagious.
They started reporting things that were happening in impossible places.
And we started looking at what was being published.
These papers were published in JAMA, you know, the Journal of American Medical Association, very prestigious journal.
And once we read the papers, we said, this is full of mistakes.
And not only we thought that, but a lot of scientists in Europe and in the States said, but this is full of mistakes.
I remember this.
And then there were even editorials and journals like Cortex.
This is impossible because they were saying that a new type of brain disorder had been identified.
But all the symptoms were typical of common diseases.
In fact, we found an article three years before or four years before the incidents published by the health service of the diplomatic service, the U.S.
And they put the most common symptoms, and they were headaches, vertigo, exactly the same thing.
So that was happening way before.
And when we started looking at the physics, our physicists said that this is impossible.
This goes against all the laws of physics.
Listen, I don't know what the laws of physics are.
I know barely how gravity works.
I certainly don't know how the brain works.
But I remember trying to parse through some of this stuff when it happened.
I was like, this doesn't seem possible.
Aim some kind of sonic or whatever beam at some microwave so specifically that it affects one person among departments in a department.
It seems it's impossible.
And, and not only that, several think tanks in the?
U.s examined this.
The reports were classified and then declassified, and the physicists of the Death that have worked with the Defense Department said it's impossible.
The second well, and it would Cuban Academy OF Science published uh, a report where we analyzed every claim and showed how it's impossible to sustain The idea of a malicious attack and also of a new syndrome, a new, a new, a new disorder.
Then the?
U.s spent millions of dollars making because it started mushrooming all over the world well, that was the thing, so catching of Anna syndrome.
This is yeah, this is, I think, psychic or sociogenic transmission.
And then the?
U.s spent millions of dollars.
Seven intelligence agencies met, made an assessment and they reached the conclusion that the whole story had no basis, that it was not a real thing.
Yeah, and then patients that have were studied at NIH and they reached the same conclusion we had reached, that it was functional neurological disorders, disorders that are real in the sense that the brain is working in an abnormal way, but the cause is not a germ, it's not trauma, it's simply anxiety, it's simply so beliefs the person creates, but the brain starts.
It starts amplifying different symptoms and this is the NIH very serious study.
Yeah, and so so we say now there are people trying to keep this alive, especially CBS 60 Minutes.
I don't know what their investment in this is why oh, you got, there's this lady Barry Wise.
I'll tell you about after this is over.
Yes, they're very crazy people owning all right, and they are continuously uh, you know, trying to, to do propaganda stunts.
Yes, we found a mysterious, mysterious weapon that has components, conveniently in Russian language inside, you know, a sort of Cyrillic ray gun right yeah, and you know they very that they bought it through a criminal organization, a Russian criminal organization, and it had, they didn't take the the, the trouble to, you know, to eliminate the uh, the component uh, if manufacturing names.
So the Russian mafia has have Anna syndrome guns.
That's what they were saying in CBS.
Oh, my god, this is.
But this is not really serious.
Nobody takes it seriously.
Yeah, and it's just propaganda stunts to keep this alive but but, but let's go, let's just walk back.
You know, take two steps backward and see the broader picture.
Gladly, you can't have it both ways.
Either the Cuban police is terribly and the Cuban, you know, security apparatus is terribly inefficient and this is a very lax society or, as the?
U.s says, there's a tight control of everything that's happening.
You can't have it ways and I think if you press the U.s they'll say, oh, the Cuban intelligence is everywhere.
The police is very repressive, very efficient.
Why would Cuba allow anybody to attack uh, dozens of U.s diplomats, when it was struggling, when it was struggling to avoid a rupture uh, in Trump era of what had been achieved during Obama's administration?
Well, so this is, this is this is the part about it that always confused me.
It was like why because you're right there they were really trying to prevent this sort of like mild detente from falling apart, which it did uh, and or falling apart is maybe the wrong word, but it was yanked by Trump uh, with Havana Singer as part of the excuse there.
And uh I I I, I.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to me because a they never figured out the technology that could do it.
I don't know if you followed this Norwegian scientist or anything, but it's also an anecdote.
That's not a scientific study.
I could give myself brain damage within 20 minutes give exactly the thousands of way of damaging your brain.
That proves nothing.
Yeah well, we got a lot of guys hitting themselves in the heads with hammers in America.
There's a lot of crazy things that are happening um but uh, but it would be maybe like the Russians are trying to disrupt you know this relations with like, they don't it's, it's.
They got bigger fish to fry.
Exactly, the Russians were interested in that.
Yeah, and a Cuba wouldn't allow it.
Yeah, I mean.
I mean that obviously this is uh, and so it seems like a cold war sort of fantasy.
It's a cold war fantasy that was used opportunistically by Marco Rubio and his it and his gang uh to, to revert everything that had been achieved during the Obama administration, which was just a little, but we managed to get a few things done.
But, for example, a Cuban ministry of Health had signed with an IH and we're going to do joint research on dengue and other diseases transmitted by mosquitoes.
Yeah, we were going to asking for a grant with Harvard to to keep on studying the effects of malnutrition in during infancy on long-term development, and all that just simply was closed.
Everybody said this is finished.
Good, god man, I mean, I can tell you you get very animated about this stuff because it's just I.
I, I can't even imagine what it would be like to have just some other country for some reason.
I mean, you're a scientist.
You probably presumably, want to be engaged in science as often as possible, exactly.
But imagine if any country had the power to disrupt life in the U.s.
Uh, like the?
U.s is disrupting Cuba, American people would get very angry.
And there's this thing, you have to put yourself on other piece of people's shoes.
Yeah, it requires empathy yeah, and I, I think many people in the?
U.s.
Empathy, and we have to reach out to them because it's criminal.
What?
What can people do to, in your opinion, in the U.s.
I think a lot of people often feel times like there's, there's not much they can do um, about a whole host of issues that our government does.
But what, as a scientist, even like, what could what?
I think we first have to uh ask people to help us break this.
Uh, This dome of science is like a Silence.
It's like anything that Cubans living in Cuba believe is not heard in the U.S.
We have to break that.
And we have to talk with politicians.
I mean, even though the Republican Party controls both houses, but I think they're decent people, even the Republican Party.
And many Democrats would understand that.
I think we have to reach out to the politicians, write to them.
And I mean, it's very interesting that you've got to be careful what you wish for.
The United States is wishing for a collapse of the Cuban government.
And they'd have to just spend some time thinking what could happen.
And at this moment, the only country which does not contribute to drug trafficking to the U.S. is Cuba, where there's zero tolerance for drugs, for drug trafficking.
And so the United States borders are being protected in the South thanks to Cuba.
And there was, I don't know if there still is, but there was some interface between the Coast Guards there.
There still is.
And there are conversations.
And I think that if you don't ask, let's say the high officials, middle-level and low-level officials are witnesses to this collaboration that avoids drugs coming from the South to the U.S.
The other thing is we have an investment in the same diseases because now with global warming, mosquitoes are flying north.
So the research we do on denge and, you know, on the Chikungunha and Sika is of use to the U.S.
And on the other hand, we have the same problems of aging populations.
So we're working very hard on Alzheimer's disease.
And as many American scientists, you know, as I just told you, believe that there could be very important contributions from Cuba.
Why can't science flow?
Because, you know, one of the things that the U.S., for a number of years, especially when it was, you know, criticizing the failures or the shortcomings of the Soviet Union, is science has to be free.
Let the scientists work together.
Because the Soviet Union was repressive that since control a lot of scientists.
So why doesn't that apply to Cuba?
So why do the laws of what should be apply only when it's convenient for you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, God, thank you so much for this.
I appreciate it.
And yeah, I mean, good luck out there.
All right, ladies and gentlemen, that was Mitchell Valdez Sosa, the good doctor.
Mitchell Valdez-Sousa.
I hope you enjoyed the interview.
And I don't know, man.
I think to me, I should have asked him more about this, but, and I don't know enough about it to even really expound upon it right now, so I might regret this.
But from what I understand, a lot of Alzheimer's research in the U.S. was sort of derailed by a bit of a fraudulent study situation that happened.
And I should have asked his opinion on that because that, like, there was all these different avenues for Alzheimer's research, which is, you know.
I really wish they kind of got their asses into gear on that.
I mean, I'm sure that they are.
But it was like a huge scandal here because I think this really important point in Alzheimer's research turned out to be maybe a little bit fudged.
And I should have asked him about that, but what are you going to do?
You know, well, we need to solve that for the sake of our great presidents.
Respectful Goodbyes and Jokes00:00:54
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I know once we cure Alzheimer's, we can have even older presidents.
There's no worry.
Think about that.
We could be in Joe Biden term, too.
Good God.
Well, we are about to jet off, get the fuck out of Miami Beach.
We're not staying in Miami Beach.
We should have.
We stayed by the airport, but it is.
What do you think of it out here?
It's warm.
It's bright, sunny.
Strange sort of people, no?
It's different.
It's not, we're not in New York anymore.
No.
No, we're in Grand Theft Auto Vice City.
Yeah.
It's really, it's a bizarre kind of place.
I keep approaching strangers and asking them to say hello to my little friends.
Yeah.
That's further down the beach.
But yeah, I keep, well, no, I want to need, we need to be respectful of the doctor.