The US is pulling out more than half its embassy staff from Cuba and warning its citizens not to travel to the island after a wave of mysterious sonic attacks that have harmed 21 American diplomats and family members.

The embassy in Havana will lose roughly 60% of its US staff and and only enough officials to carry out “core consular and diplomatic functions” will remain. Routine issue of visas will be suspended. All family members will also be withdrawn.

“We consider the decision announced today by the US government through the state department is hasty and will affect bilateral relations,” Cuba’s foreign ministry official in charge of US affairs, Josefina Vidal, said.

A senior US official said some of the attacks were carried out in hotels, and appear to have affected just the diplomats staying there, and not other guests or hotel workers. There was therefore reason to believe the attacks were targeted, and that it may be unsafe for US citizens to travel to Cuba.

“We don’t know the means, the methods and how these attacks are being carried out,” a senior official said. “The fact that some of these attacks have occurred in hotels where American citizens could be … we felt we must warn them not to travel to Cuba until we know more about the source and ways to mitigate these attacks.”

The Cuban government, whose foreign minister flew to Washington to discuss the issue on Tuesday, has denied any involvement in the attack and has offered full cooperation in a US investigation.

But Friday’s decision deals a blow tothe halting rapprochement between the US and Cuba, longtime enemies who only recently began putting their hostility behind them.

Senior state department officials who announced the decision said it was still not clear who was responsible for the “targeted attacks” which have caused injuries including permanent hearing loss, brain injuries, dizziness, tinnitus, problems with balance, visual impairment, headaches, fatigue, cognitive issues and difficulties sleeping.

The range of symptoms has raised speculation of some kind of sonic weapons, while some former intelligence officers have suggested they might be a result of a surveillance effort that went badly wrong.

Although the state department has called them “incidents” and generally avoided deeming them attacks, officials said on Friday the US has now determined there were “specific attacks” on American personnel in Cuba.

An official said the possibility that a third country was responsible for the attacks had not been ruled out but that investigations are continuing. He said Cuba continued to cooperate.

Several Canadian households in Cuba are also believed to have been affeceted by the sonic attacks, but Canada said it had no plans to remove any staff from Cuba or warn travellers against heading to the island.

“At this time, we do not have any reason to believe Canadian tourists and other visitors could be affected,” Global Affairs Canada said in a statement to the Guardian. Canadians rank among the island’s most frequent visitors.

“The cause of the symptoms remains unknown,” it said. “The government of Canada continues to work closely with Cuban authorities to ascertain the cause of these unusual symptoms.”

For now, the United States is not ordering any Cuban diplomats to leave Washington, another move that the administration had considered, officials said. Several US lawmakers have called on the administration to expel all Cuban diplomats. In May, Washington asked two to leave, but emphasized it was to protest against Havana’s failure to protect diplomats on its soil, not an accusation of blame.



Cubans seeking visas to enter the US may be able to apply through embassies in nearby countries, officials said. The US will also stop sending official delegations to Cuba, though diplomatic discussions will continue in Washington.

The moves deliver a significant setback to the delicate reconciliation between the US and Cuba, two countries that endured a half-century estrangement despite their locations only 90 miles apart. In 2015, Barack Obama and Cuba’s President Raúl Castro restored diplomatic ties. Embassies reopened, and travel and commerce restrictions were eased. Trump has reversed some changes, but has broadly left the rapprochement in place.

The Trump administration has pointedly not blamed Cuba for perpetrating the attacks. Officials involved in the deliberations said the administration had weighed the best way to minimize potential risk for Americans in Havana without unnecessarily harming relations between the countries. Rather than describe it as punitive, the administration will emphasize Cuba’s responsibility to keep diplomats on its soil safe.

Though officials initially suspected some futuristic “sonic attack”, the picture has grown muddier. The FBI and other agencies that searched homes and hotels where incidents occurred found no devices. And clues about the circumstances of the incidents seem to make any explanation scientifically implausible.

Some US diplomats reported hearing various loud noises or feeling vibrations when the incidents occurred, but others heard and felt nothing yet reported symptoms later. In some cases, the effects were narrowly confined, with victims able to walk “in” and “out” of blaring noises audible in only certain rooms or parts of rooms, the AP has reported.

Though the incidents stopped for a time, they recurred as recently as late August.

Already, staffing at the embassy in Havana was at lower-than-usual levels due to recent hurricanes that have whipped through Cuba. In early September, the state department issued an “authorized departure”, allowing embassy employees and relatives who wanted to leave voluntarily to depart ahead of Hurricane Irma.

Though Cuba implored the United States not to react hastily, it appeared that last-minute lobbying by Castro’s diplomats was unsuccessful. The days leading up to the decision involved a frantic bout of diplomacy that brought about the highest-level diplomatic contacts between the countries since the start of Trump’s administration in January.

Last week, the Cuban official who has been the public face of the diplomatic opening with the US, Josefina Vidal, came to the state department for a meeting with American officials in which the US pressed its concerns.

As concerns grew about a possible embassy shutdown, Cuba requested an urgent meeting Tuesday between its foreign minister, Bruno Rodríguez, and Tillerson in which the Cuban again insisted his government had nothing to do with the incidents.

Rodríguez added that his government also would never let another country hostile to the US. use Cuban territory to attack Americans.

Citing its own investigation, Cuba’s embassy said after the meeting: “There is no evidence so far of the cause or the origin of the health disorders reported by the US diplomats.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report