‘THIS IS GOING ON IN MY HOUSE’
Diplomats who became ill in Cuba allege government ‘interfered’ with their attempts to receive care
For many Canadian diplomats with young families, it was a dream posting. Life in Havana was busy, pleasant and generally sunny.
Diplomats and their families enjoyed year-round sports — tennis, golf, swimming, snorkelling, sailing and horseback riding. Diplomatic staff played ultimate Frisbee in neighbourhood parks.
There were minor complications. They had to spend part of their annual leave back home doing rounds of medical appointments and stocking up on supplies, for example. But life in the upscale Havana neighbourhood of Miramar, where many international diplomats lived — a community dotted with colonial homes, embassies and palm trees — was family friendly.
Their children attended the International School of Havana, founded by a British expat in 1965. It was a progressive school that emphasized academics and sports and catered to children of the diplomatic community.
Such was the life Diplomat Allen, his wife and their two teenage sons were living in 2017, on their second posting to Cuba. They frequently socialized. Their boys went to a good school, they were involved in sports and their buddies were in and out of the house.
“We had a nice house, we had a good life down there,” Allen said.
Then everything changed, in ways that, at first, the family didn’t understand.
Allen, as he is identified in legal documents, is one of 15 people, including five diplomats and their families from the Ottawa area, who are suing the federal government for $28 million in connection with mysterious health issues they suffered when they were posted to Cuba.
The suit alleges the Canadian government failed to properly inform, protect, treat and support the Canadians.
“Throughout the crisis, Canada downplayed the seriousness of the situation, hoarded and concealed critical health and safety information, and gave false, misleading and incomplete information to diplomatic staff,” the suit alleges.
In the past few years, the lawsuit contends, Canadian diplomatic families in Havana “have been targeted and injured, suffering severe and traumatic harm by means that are not clear but may be some type of sonic or microwave weapon.”
The brain injuries they’ve experienced, similar to injuries suffered by American diplomats posted to Cuba, are now known as Havana Syndrome.
The complainants’ allegations have not been tested in court.
In the wake of the lawsuit, Postmedia spoke to a number of the diplomats now home in the Ottawa area.
They spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying they still fear for their security and that of their families.
Diplomat Allen, which is the pseudonym he uses in the lawsuit, admits he is shaken by some of the negative comments people have posted on the bottom of stories about the case, suggesting the symptoms are invented.
At the start of a lengthy interview, he asked Postmedia: “What did you think the first time you heard about this. Did you believe it?”
In the late winter of 2017, the previously healthy members of the Allen family began experiencing symptoms, from nosebleeds to headaches, they couldn’t explain.
They would wake up with excruciating headaches. They experienced nausea and vision problems.
Their youngest son, 12, was getting as many as four nosebleeds a day, even passing out. Mrs. Allen began hearing high-pitched noises. The couple became uncharacteristically irritable.
“We knew there was something, but we just couldn’t figure out what was going on.”
Then, one evening in early April, there was a knock on their door. An American diplomat who lived across the street asked if Allen would go for a walk.
“Living in Cuba, we understood that our houses were bugged.” What Allen learned shook him. His neighbour told him a dozen Americans had already been evacuated from Havana after suffering from symptoms including nausea, headaches, nosebleeds, hearing and eye problems.
He told Allen the symptoms were believed to be the result of attacks with some kind of a weapon, maybe sonic.
“It just hit me, ‘Holy crap, this is going on in my house.’ ”
The American diplomat was upset that the U.S. government had not told the Canadians about the situation. His colleagues had been sworn to secrecy, but he hadn’t yet been “gagged,” so he took the opportunity to warn Allen, “because we lived so close and he thought we were in danger.”
The next day, Allen went to the ambassador, who began high-level talks but warned Allen not to tell his Canadian colleagues, allegedly saying: “We don’t want to start mass hysteria.”
On June 1, 2017, Allen woke up around 3 a.m. to a “grinding, screeching metallic noise” that filled the bedroom of their home and lasted about 30 seconds. As it faded, the sound slowed down and became lower. He was paralyzed with nausea.
“At the low point, I thought I was going to throw up. I was nauseous like you wouldn’t believe. I don’t know whether I went back to sleep or passed out.”
His son came into the bedroom upset and covered in blood from a severe nosebleed. His wife took him back to his room where she changed his bloody sheets and clothes.
Allen woke up in the morning feeling awful.
The next day, Allen went to tell the ambassador what had happened. On the way up the stairs at the embassy, a colleague jokingly asked if he was drunk because he was stumbling.
When he got to a high-security zone inside the embassy, Allen swiped his card and looked at the keypad but couldn’t remember his code. He began randomly punching numbers.
“It wasn’t like me. I had never done that.”
He told officials he could no longer wait for the Canadian Embassy to take action.
Two days later, the family was sent to the University of Miami to undergo testing with a doctor who had examined at least 20 Americans who had been based in Havana.
All four members of the Allen family were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries akin to concussions.
The physician recommended the children not return to Cuba, saying: “They need to be away from Cuba for a while.”
Allen asked the Canadian embassy if he could send his sons directly to Ottawa from Miami, but that request was denied, according to the statement of claim.
The family returned to Cuba but quickly sent the boys ahead to Ottawa to stay with relatives. Allen and his wife followed soon after for a three-week holiday.
That break left them feeling refreshed and optimistic. Their health, which had been a worry for months, seemed better after the break in Canada. Since the Canadian diplomatic staff had not been allowed to talk to each other about their experiences and they weren’t aware of any other affected Canadians, the Allens hoped maybe it was a “one-off thing ” and agreed to return to Cuba. They were hopeful their lives could return to normal, but cautious.
“If we heard another family was pulling out, we were gone.”
They did not return to Havana for long. By October they were back in Ottawa for good, coping with worrisome symptoms and waiting for medical assistance and information.
Meanwhile, other Canadians in Havana were suffering mysterious and debilitating symptoms.
Diplomat Davies, his wife and their two young children were having strange experiences in their nearby Havana house during the spring and summer of 2017.
Early in the year, their young daughter began having difficulty concentrating at school. She suffered from nausea, tinnitus, sensitivity to light, visual impairment, and, like the Allen children, sudden nosebleeds, sometimes in the middle of the night.
Mrs. Davies had complained about hearing high-pitched sounds. Then, during a game of ultimate Frisbee with American and Canadian diplomats in a local park, she suddenly fell to the ground.
“I no longer knew where was up and where was down,” she told her concerned husband of the fall.
The Davies family was sent back to the Ottawa area in August 2017.
Mrs. Davies was diagnosed as having damage to her vestibular system — which includes parts of the inner ear and brain that processes sensory information.
She was hypersensitive to light and noise, suffered from headaches, dizziness and muscle twitching that would last for days. She often spent long parts of the day sleeping.
She now works part-time, has to wear special glasses because of sensitivity to light and vestibular damage and continues to suffer from headaches and to be easily overwhelmed by light and sounds.
Their daughter had difficulty concentrating at school and had sudden nosebleeds, nausea and light sensitivity, among other symptoms. She had tinnitus and heard three distinct sounds. Those sounds were so persistent that the little girl gave each one a name.
Davies has since had testing that has shown he has visual impairments and “fusional facility problems,” which are associated with brain injuries and can result in blurred vision, headaches, eye fatigue, motion sickness and loss of concentration. He has had several strange episodes involving visual impairment and confusion, including one in which he could no longer see what he was writing in a notebook and another in which he experienced confusion, flashbacks and a sense of déjà vu.
The Davies are among diplomats undergoing testing at Dalhousie University’s Brain Repair Centre. Some of that research, he said, has identified leakages in the groups’ blood brain barriers consistent with concussions.
The statement of claim contends that Global Affairs “actively interfered with the plaintiffs’ attempts to receive proper health care, including going so far as instructing hospitals to stop testing and treating them.”
That happened, according to the suit filed by the former diplomats, when two members of the group, frustrated with lack of information and delays, travelled on their own to the University of Pennsylvania, which had been treating affected U.S. diplomats and had developed an expertise on Havana Syndrome.
Diplomat Baker, who was posted to Havana with her two young children, began experiencing symptoms of Havana syndrome in early 2017, including tinnitus, headaches and vertigo. Her elementary school-aged daughter was nauseous, had headaches and heavy nosebleeds.
Baker underwent medical testing that confirmed balance and vestibular issues and suggested the need for further investigation early in 2017, but was told followup testing would not take place for months.
Distressed about the symptoms and lack of medical attention, Baker and Mrs. Davies went to the University of Pennsylvania at their own expense after officials there offered to assess and treat Canadians but were turned down by the federal government.
While there, the medical team confirmed Baker had a brain injury that was visible on MRI and similar to those suffered by affected American diplomats. Testing on her daughter disclosed post-concussion symptoms. Her son was cleared.
And then testing was interrupted, according to the statement of claim, when Canada used diplomatic channels in the United States to instruct the University of Pennsylvania Centre for Brain Injury and Repair to “stop testing Canadians.”
But the assessments on the Canadians sparked action from the federal government, says Baker, who pushed for all the Canadian cohort of diplomats to get tested.
Shortly after the women and children returned from Pennsylvania, the Canadian government pulled diplomatic families out of Cuba and told those back in Canada suffering symptoms that they would all get assessed and treated.
Today, Baker does not work, undergoes cognitive therapy and still must live “a very cocooned life” because of ongoing symptoms and sensitivities. Her daughter, who was the first child tested at the University of Pennsylvania to show clear evidence of concussion, according to her mother, has visual impairment and other ongoing symptoms.
While the Ottawa five wait for some resolution, many of them remain anxious, even angry. Before taking legal action, they wrote to the prime minister, among others, looking for better care and support. Some have speculated that the federal government didn’t want to jeopardize its longstanding diplomatic relationship with Cuba.
“My belief, 21 months later, is that decisions were made that simply did not prioritize us, not our health, not our safety and not that of our families.
“I am angry, yes,” Baker says. “I am disappointed and I am sad. I am sad because there is no justification for not having considered the personal and lifelong impact this was going to have on us.”
Members of all five families, including young children, suffer from neurological symptoms. Some are still unable to work full time, many have long-term effects including cognitive vestibular and ocular motor dysfunction requiring therapy, special glasses and special accommodation.
The young child with severe tinnitus who heard three distinct sounds named one of them Emile.
Allen recounts receiving a tearful phone call from his wife who had gone to the grocery store and couldn’t find her way home.
The lawsuit claims that Canada “badly mishandled” the crisis as it grew and failed to ensure the safety of the diplomats and their families.
“Despite knowing of the risks of Havana Syndrome early on, Canada continued to put its diplomats and their families in harm’s way by sending them to Havana and requiring them to stay there despite becoming aware of the high and growing risk that they would sustain the brain injuries associated with Havana Syndrome.”
The government has confirmed 15 cases of diplomats and their families who have been affected while in Havana. With the latest confirmed case in January of this year, staff at the Canadian mission in Havana has been reduced from 16 to eight, and families are no longer permitted as part of the posting.
Allen, meanwhile, is back to work for Global Affairs Canada, but his wife is unable to return to the kind of life she led before the mysterious attacks.
“She is not the same person who went to Cuba,” Allen says. “She used to love to read. She can’t stand reading now. She used to be a whiz with numbers. Not anymore. She can’t work. She is suffering from PTSD.”
Last month, the government said in a statement: “The health, safety and security of our diplomatic staff and their families remain our priority. The Canadian government continues to investigate the potential causes of the unusual health symptoms experienced by some Canadian diplomatic staff and their family members posted in Havana, Cuba. To date, no cause has been identified . ... There is no evidence that Canadian travellers to Cuba are at risk.
“Canada has a positive and constructive relationship with Cuba. We have had close co-operation with the Cuban authorities since the health concerns of our employees posted in Havana first surfaced in the spring of 2017.”
My belief, 21 months later, is that decisions were made that simply did not prioritize us, not our health, not our safety and not that of our families.