The ‘Havana Syndrome’ Controversy and US Foreign Policy: Imaginaries of the New Cold War

In 2016, dozens of American embassy staff in Havana, Cuba, reported suffering from mysterious cognitive and neurological symptoms. It was initially conjectured that the symptoms could be attributed to sonic attacks from a novel weapon, though the likelihood of this was consistently disputed. Confounding medical researchers, the condition came to be known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. In subsequent years, the phenomenon expanded to other locales, affecting hundreds of US and Western diplomats in Cuba, China, Vietnam, Washington, DC and elsewhere. This paper explores the debates and depictions of ‘Havana Syndrome’ in US foreign policy. It situates the controversy in the changing geopolitical environment of the previous decade, which witnessed increased tensions between the ‘great powers’. Because of the frequent speculation that Russia could be behind the ‘attacks’, the Havana Syndrome controversy provides fruitful terrain to explore US imaginaries of the ‘new Cold War’. Blending content and discourse analysis of reports and statements in US policy and media circles, the paper leverages the controversy to trace the fault lines, boundaries, and uncertainties of the ‘new Cold War’. It argues that the phenomenon not only reflects the anxieties of this new geopolitical reality, it illustrates the power of imagination in creating these new realities.