Cue, The Ears And Hearing: …What is sound? As the hammer strikes the gong, molecules of air are set into waves or patterns of motion. These waves act upon the ear, which then transmits nerve impulses to the brain…
Cue, Max: Hey Nicky, can you hear me alright?
Cue, The Ears And Hearing: …This is what happens whenever we hear a sound. Sound waves enter the ear through an external opening…
Cue, Nicky: Can you hear me from there?
Cue, The Ears And Hearing:…First, the sound waves pass through an outer part of the ear called the outer ear. As the eardrum vibrates, it moves the chain of three tiny bones connected with it…
Cue, Nicky: Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Cue, Max: Yep, you’re coming through clean…
Cue, The Ears And Hearing: … The bone attached to the eardrum is the hammer. The middle bone is the anvil. And the bone at the right is the stirrup.
Cue, Max: Alright can everyone hear me?
Cue, Beatrice: I can hear you.
Cue, Max: Uh, Dr. Golomb, I have Nicky Wolff here…
Cue, Max: …he’s out in New York, I’m in DC, so we’re doing a little conference call… Um, Nicky is the lead reporter on…
[BEAT]
When the story of what’s happening in Havana goes public in 2017, it’s chaos.
Beneath the surface, there are several classified investigations underway. The FBI are in Cuba. The CIA is doing its own. The medical centers treating patients are writing up studies.
Publicly, it’s a mess.
The only official line – such as there is – is State blaming a “sound device.” Bob and Robert from the last episode are preparing their arguments for the psychogenic thesis. And the cricket-noise tape has been released.
No-one has much of a clue what’s going on.
Well. That’s not quite true.
Beatrice Golomb is pretty sure she knows.
[CUE, THEME]
From Project Brazen and PRX, this is THE SOUND.
I’m Nicky Woolf.
[BEAT]
Chapter 4.
The Frey Effect.
[BEAT]
Sometimes, in a story, you get someone who turns up who is exactly the right person, with the right idea, at the right moment.
In this story, that’s Beatrice.
Cue, Beatrice: Hi, I’m Dr. Beatrice Golomb, I’m a professor of medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
She’s got a pretty unique set of skills. A degree in physics. Then a switch to medicine. Postdoc work in computational neurobiology. And she’s worked with the RAND corporation, a defense industry think tank.
This combination of expertise is why she has a starring role in this story. It’s why, when she hears about what’s happening in Havana, a lightbulb goes off.
Beatrice is the first, publicly at least, to connect the dots and propose a new hypothesis. A new way to solve the Havana mystery.
It’s a theory that sounds crazy at first. But trust me: it’s worth hearing.
Cue, anchor: …it should have come as no surprise that this attack started tonight in Iraq and occupied Kuwait.
Cue, Bush Sr: Aggression is defeated, the war is over…
When the first Gulf War ended in 1991, a bunch of returning soldiers reported a cluster of symptoms. Muscle and joint pain. Trouble thinking. Dizziness. Insomnia. Nausea. Headaches. Exhaustion.
Beatrice was asked by the Department of Defense to go to the Middle East to investigate the condition – which had become known as “Gulf War Syndrome.”
I’m learning that not a huge amount of imagination goes into naming these things.
Cue, Beatrice: We’ve had Gulf War veterans tell us that in the early years after the Gulf War, their biggest psychic wounds are not from the atrocities and horrors they experienced during war. They’re from the way they were treated after they came back…
It’s almost eerie how similar parts of these stories are – though Gulf War Syndrome was, it’s worth saying, much more widespread.
Cue, Beatrice: 700,000 approximately personnel from the U.S. or about 44,000 from the UK as well who deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1990 – 1991 developed chronic multi-symptom health problems…
What’s the saying? “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes?”
Cue, Beatrice: And initially there were lots of claims that these were psychogenic or mass hysteria or et cetera.
Lots of theories were thrown around. And one of the most persistent ones, just like in our story, was that it was psychogenic. A mass post-traumatic delusion.
Cue, Beatrice: And then the Psychogenic Illness Hypothesis was trotted out, which was excellent because it essentially blames the victim and implies that it’s their fault …
A columnist wrote in National Review that: “When a non-vet gets a cough, it’s called ‘a cough.’ If a Gulf War vet gets one, it’s called Gulf War Syndrome.”
Cue, Beatrice: After serving their country honorably and with valor and putting their life on the line for their country, when they would go in for medical care, these sorts of accusations were leveled against them and this disbelief in their symptoms, et cetera, were leveled against them.
For decades, thousands of veterans struggled to get doctors to take them seriously. A chief of staff at the Veterans Affairs medical center in Houston said, quote, “If you go out on the street in any city in this country, you’ll find people who have exactly the same things and they’ve never been to the Gulf.”
Asterisk: he was fired for that. But still.
All this means Havana Syndrome wasn’t the first time that Beatrice had come across an illness that got labeled as psychogenic.
Cue, Beatrice: …people come to me and they say, ‘you know, we have this terrible problem, and the medical community, rather than being our partner in the search for the truth, seems to be working against us.’
Beatrice became head of the advisory committee on Gulf War veterans’ illnesses at the VA. For years, she fought for Gulf War Syndrome to be taken seriously. And eventually … She was proved right.
Cue, Beatrice: … because this group is large enough, and enough resources eventually went into it, you know, abundant evidence has emerged.
Researchers at the University of Texas finally proved it was caused by exposure to sarin gas, a nerve toxin released into the air by the bombing of Saddam’s chemical weapons facilities.
Absolutely, OK, sure. Gulf War Syndrome and Havana Syndrome are different. The story doesn’t necessarily end the same way.
But still, I have to admit, this makes me uneasy. About the Bobs, and their ironclad certainty that what’s happening with Havana Syndrome is all psychogenic. Because it doesn’t seem clear-cut to me at all.
[BEAT]
[Cue, The Ears And Hearing: “The semi-transparent membrane vibrating at the lower left is the eardrum, this is the sound that is causing the eardrum to vibrate….”]
“Microwaves might explain some of these cases…”
So in the winter of 20-18, Havana Syndrome cases are being reported around the world. And more formal investigations are gearing up.
The State Department has already asked the secretive JASON group to investigate. But now they go big.
They commission a who’s-who of the scientific community. They want a headline, big-ticket investigation – hoping to get a comprehensive answer to the question.
The question being: what the hell is going on?
One person State brings in is Linda Birnbaum. She’s the former director of the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences.
Cue, Linda: I’m a member of the National Academy of Medicine. And the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine was asked by the Department of State to do a consensus report, trying to understand what had gone on in Havana, if anything.
They need someone to chair the committee…
Cue, Linda: And that was David Relman of Stanford University.
Cue, Relman: I am a professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. I’m also Chief of Infectious Diseases at the VA Medical Center in Palo Alto, California.
They have biologists. Ophthalmologists. Neurologists. Toxicologists. Radiation experts. Engineers. Specialists in emergency medicine and psychiatry. Biostatisticians.
The committee hears directly from victims in the original Havana cohort.
Cue, Relman: Every person on our committee was almost mesmerized by the individuals who, who spoke to us. I, I think for many of us as clinicians, it was quite clear that what we were hearing were the features of an illness that none of us had, had heard about or seen or read in the literature.
These were cases … that, that simply defied an easy explanation.
As we heard in the last episode, the Bobs – with their psychogenic theory – make a pretty compelling case.
But when the Academy investigators looked closer, they found the mass delusion idea had a few… issues.
Cue, Relman: These early cases defied the definition of mass psychogenic illness for a whole variety of reasons. And we went through the, you know, the definitions and, and said, ‘Yeah, this just doesn’t hang together.’
Absolutely, as we’ve seen, the power of suggestibility on the brain is greater than most of us imagine. It is capable of causing physical symptoms.
But… let’s look again at that timeline I laid out in the last episode.
How Karen Coats isn’t hit until after the first embassy briefing. How Doug and Kate Ferguson don’t get symptoms until after they’re told about it.
[CUE, MUSIC]
That all-hands briefing Karen was at with the others.
Cue, Kevin: …it was very vague at that point in time.
Karen’s Husband Kevin Coats.
Cue, Kevin: ‘Something’s been going on,, we don’t think it’s gonna be significant. We don’t think it’s gonna affect any of you.’
OK sure: by the time she has her first event, Karen is aware something is going on. She may well have internalized the idea that she could get sick too.
But the power of suggestion has limits. Headaches, nausea, dizziness – sure, it can cause those, easy. But it can’t do what happened to Karen.
Cue, Kevin: “It looked like her retina was bleeding.”
It can’t make you bleed from the eyes.
[BEAT]
And Doug and Kate Ferguson, it turns out, heard the sound long before they got told about the sickness.
Here’s Doug.
Cue, Doug: We didn’t associate the sound with any kind of attack or with any health effects, that kind of thing.
True, the recording he made was later identified as a cricket. To be honest, the whole cricket thing is super awkward.
But Doug says they also had symptoms before they knew something was going on.
Cue, Doug: …you know, some balance issues, and, and headaches – that kind of thing, nausea…
Even later, after they get warned, after they report the sound – even after they get medevaced – they still don’t believe they’re sick. This idea that they were scared into feeling ill… just doesn’t quite line up.
In Miami, their diagnosis doesn’t come from them describing symptoms. It’s not at all about what they’re feeling. They feel relatively fine. It’s from all the tests they did… like that eye-tracking test. There Doug only sees the problem when the video is played back for him.
Cue, Doug: …what we saw in the recording of our eyes was that tracking that dot across our field of vision was jerky…
That’s not something you can chalk up to the power of suggestion. And that’s the first time Doug and Kate even consider something might be wrong with them.
Cue, Doug: …quite frankly, we were surprised cuz you know, we didn’t think there was anything big going on. We didn’t think that we had brain injuries. We thought we had run of-the-mill nausea and headaches and things like that…
So… the psychogenic hypothesis just doesn’t seem to hold up for the victims we’ve spoken to. And Dr. David Relman tells us that there’s lots of cases like that.
Cue, Relman: Mass psychogenic illness depends upon a communication network. And that’s how the contagion occurs. Yet when we talked to the very earliest cases in Havana, their cases were closely held.
Once Havana Syndrome is splurged all over the global media, that’s different.
But as an explanation for what happened to that core, first group? The Academy were…unconvinced.
Cue, Relman: It seemed unlikely that Case #2 could have essentially caught it from Case #1, when Case #1 had not, you know, uttered a word about it. That basic feature of mass psychogenic illness seemed to be missing.
But what does that leave us with? The psychogenic theory was the strongest yet. The Academy committee was back to square one – and, once again, so are we.
Cometh the hour though… cometh Beatrice Golomb.
[BEAT]
Cue, Nicky: When was the first time you, you’d have heard of Havana syndrome?
Cue, Beatrice: Probably when everyone else did, when news broke in sort of the mid to latter part of, uh, 2017.
Immediately, some details just leap out at her. Remember how Karen Coats could almost step in and out of the sound, and it would suddenly stop and start. That was a common experience to a lot of the victims.
Cue, Beatrice: …the fact that there was supposed tight localization of the sound in space, so that for some people they moved a couple feet away and the sound abruptly stopped. They moved back, the sound abruptly came back, or as reported that in some cases, someone heard a sound that was pretty loud, but someone else in the immediate vicinity heard nothing.
It’s an extremely important detail. If these reports were accurate, it struck Beatrice that this sound wasn’t behaving like… well, like sound.
It wasn’t going in through the ears. Not the way a sonic weapon like an LRAD would.
The point is: sound waves are extremely difficult to contain.
Cue, Beatrice: When they covered their ears or covered their head, there was no perceived attenuation in the intensity of the sound.
Cue, Beatrice: And of course the media had been focusing on so-called sonic weapons.
To Beatrice, it’s clear this idea doesn’t fit. But she knew something … that did.
Cue, Nicky: And, and what was your immediate, kind of, reaction?
Cue, Beatrice: Uh, I pretty quickly suspected that pulsed radiofrequency radiation might be involved.
There was a reason for that.
Cue, Beatrice: Anyone who knew about the Frey Effect probably wondered or, you know, some people who knew about electromagnetic injury, but hardly anybody knew about both. And that’s where I was in a lucky position.
The Frey Effect.
To Beatrice, this is the missing puzzle-piece – the one that fits perfectly.
Beatrice publishes a paper, the first to outline this theory.
And a few months later, she gets called in to brief David, Linda, and the rest of the big blue-ribbon Academy committee about it.
This is a turning-point for their investigation. Beatrice, they conclude… may be on to something.
Cue, Relman: In the past, some of the clinical features had been elicited with pulsed radio frequency energy going all the way back to the 1960s and the work of a really amazing engineer named Allan Frey …
Cue, Relman: We weren’t saying that the Frey Effect was what was happening in Havana…
…
…but something like it was plausible.
[SONIC WIPE]
So… what exactly are we talking about here? What… is… the “Frey Effect”?
We’ll dive into that… after the break.
[AD BREAK]
We’re back.
[BEAT]
Timestamp: 1960.
[Musical cue]
Allan Frey, a 25-year-old biologist, is working for General Electric’s Advanced Electronics Centre, at Cornell University in upstate New York. When, one day, he gets approached by a technician who tells him he can *hear* *radar.*
I don’t know if the guy opened with this or made some polite small-talk first. “How’s the family? Got any nice weekend plans? I can hear radar!” But in any case, Frey is intrigued.
He asks the technician to take him to the array so he can try it. To his astonishment, Frey discovers when he stands in front of the dish, that he, too, can hear it.
A clicking, buzzing, hissing sound.
[Cue, clicking buzzing hissing sound]
The sound, he noted in a paper the following September, never changed direction. No matter which way he faced or how much he twisted his head around, it was still coming from what felt like either directly behind his head or inside it.
Cue, Relman: He then experimentally produced those sounds by exposing volunteers to forms of, of pulsed radio frequency energy. And he found that he could change the kinds of sounds by changing the pulsing.
Frey had discovered that rapid, repeated pulses of microwave radiation, can cause the brain to experience a sound as if from within.
[Mini-BEAT]
Cue, Relman: And interestingly found that only some people were susceptible. So he would, you know, shine it on a bunch of people and some would hear it and some wouldn’t. You clearly could produce sounds in the head that others didn’t hear with pulsed radio frequency energy.
The paper is a wild read. “With appropriate modulation, the perception of various sounds can be induced in clinically deaf, as well as normal, human subjects, at a distance of inches up to thousands of feet from the transmitter.”
That’s nuts.
Anyway. The US government hired Frey and gave him access to radar towers for research. He spent the next several decades putting humans and animals – and himself – in front of them, to see what happens.
In one particularly memorable 1968 paper, Frey describes an experiment. Content warning for animal cruelty here. First, the researchers conditioned cats to respond to sound cues. Then, they surgically removed the cochlea in their ears, deafening them, to see if they’d respond to the microwaves the same way.
This experiment did not go well.
“Just as I reached the final stage, the transmitter was taken away on two days’ notice to be used in South-East Asia.”
In a crash effort to salvage some data, he managed to shove a few cats in front of the dish before it was taken.
Some seemed to respond, but “no conclusions, however, should be drawn,” he wrote, explaining – and I love the deadpan of this line so much – “behavioral research with deafened cats is difficult at best.”
Later in that same paper something caught my eye. Frey wrote “as an aside and incidental to the foregoing work, I noticed that headaches appeared to be induced at some frequencies at low power levels.”
Conceivably, the headache could have been down to, y’know, the two or three dozen deaf cats he had running around. But I can’t help myself thinking: could it, maybe, have been the first instance of something like Havana Syndrome?
[BEAT]
Beatrice had been the first to publicly link what was happening in Cuba with Frey’s work. But the idea was catching on. It just fit so perfectly.
Microwaves can cause tiny heat changes in tissue that in turn cause pressure waves to reverberate inside the skull. It’s those waves that cause an auditory sensation – the Frey Effect – when it interacts with the inner ear. That, according to this theory, is the sound.
And that heat change can also cause damage – which could explain the traumatic brain injuries doctors were seeing in these Havana victims.
Linda Birnbaum says it all lined up.
Cue Linda: You know, I think because of the directed nature of what people felt like could be a beam because they could move out of it. Well, I think that was a lot of the basis for focusing on the radiation … plus the fact that we know that that kind of radiation can impact the brain.
Nicky: … And that’s how you ruled out, for example, the Cicada noise hypothesis and things like that…
Linda: I don’t think …
Nicky: …let the record show that that was a wince [laughs].
Linda: I don’t, I don’t think we gave that too much …credence …
The Frey Effect theory has a poetic quality to it, a sort of balance. Here’s David Relman again.
Cue, Relman: Lots of mechanisms can explain headache, lots of mechanisms can explain dizziness, but relatively few mechanisms are gonna explain illnesses that begin in this dramatic manner with location dependence and this kind of repeatable locality feature.
So the Academy committee could make a pretty well-educated guess.
But they couldn’t quite reach a definitive conclusion, because by the time their committee was formed, Linda and David and their colleagues found that the data available was already changing. Degrading, as the phenomenon spread.
The challenges they faced were, essentially, the same ones we have in making this show.
A lot of the patient data is imperfect. As we’ve heard, there’s no control group for the brain scans. And the US agencies – especially the CIA – didn’t allow full access to the patients.
The situation was changing too fast. They were just feeling in the dark.
Cue, Nicky: Was that frustrating as, as, you know, being part of this? You’re sort of like, you know, if you’d just called us earlier…
Linda: Well, um, let’s just say things don’t happen in the Academy instantaneously, but when the first reports came back, the State Department could have investigated it more quickly. … they could have gotten an Academy committee up and running, certainly within a matter of a couple of months.
Instead, it took two years.
Cue, Nicky: I wonder if you could just sort of, in terms of the testimony from sufferers themselves, is there anything you heard that, that particularly sticks out in your mind?
Linda: The pain. The tremendous emotional and physical pain. People being unable to do what they used to do or even enjoy doing and feeling that they had been permanently harmed … Here these people were public servants trying to do a good thing and something had happened to them and that they would probably never be the same.
Cue, The Ears and Hearing: “Since next to sight, hearing is our most important sense, it is fortunate that for most of us our ears will serve well throughout life, helping us to understand and enjoy our environment.”
So the Academy committee found a plausible theory for what happened in Havana. But they felt their work was incomplete…
Cue, Relman: Yeah, I’ll tell you one thing … we realized there was more than enough there in these studies to warrant a much deeper dive on what had been done and follow-on studies in previous cases and new cases to do this even better.
So why is it that everyone’s still unable to find the basic answers? Why have all these various investigations pretty much come up empty-handed?
We’re not the only one asking that question.In June 2018, an internal State Department accountability review is completed and classified “secret.” But it’s made public three years later.
The review said State’s response had been, quote, “characterized by a lack of senior leadership, ineffective communications, and systemic disorganization.” Senior leadership posts went unfilled, so the chain of command was unclear. “Serious deficiencies” were found “at all levels” in coordination and communication.
And it wasn’t just State. CIA had hampered early investigations, the report said, because of an approach of, quote, “excessive secrecy that contributed to a delayed response.”
What the heck is going on with these agencies?
To figure out where the process went so wrong, we made a couple of calls. First was to Frank Figliuzzi. (Fig-LOSE-ee)
[BEAT]
Cue, Frank: So … um … I don’t think it’s going well.
Cue, Frank: So my name is Frank Figliuzzi, I am the retired FBI assistant director for counterintelligence. I spent 25 years as an FBI special agent…
The American national security apparatus can be… kind of a mess when it comes to tightly-coordinated action.
Cue, Frank: Well, look, the size and scope of the US intelligence community has traditionally resulted in challenges with regard to sharing information … and so there could be instances where State Department’s not talking to CIA, CIA’s not talking to FBI. FBI’s not talking to others.
The agencies – CIA especially, but also the FBI, State and the DoD – sometimes seem like they’re operating as their own private fiefdoms.
Cue, Frank: if all the members of the intelligence community aren’t playing nicely in the sandbox, that’s part of incompetence and that’s gonna be a problem and delay results…
The way I look at it is as cops and robbers. The FBI see themselves as hard-bitten gumshoes, whose job is to enforce American law. The CIA see themselves as spies – their job is to go overseas and break it. This difference in outlook has led to a history, Frank says, of the two “butting heads.”
Cue, Frank: …because of various missions, and the great lengths that all the agencies go to protect those sources and methods,sometimes there is a reticence to share what you know.
And so, if you’re operating with blinders on and you only see a quarter or a half or three-quarters of the story, you’ll perhaps never get to the end of the story.
Our second call was to Charlie Kupperman.
Cue, Kupperman: I’m Charles Kupperman. I was Deputy National Security Advisor from 2000-late-18 through 2019.
Kupperman’s first official involvement with Havana Syndrome was when three National Security Council staffers appeared to get hit with the same symptoms.
This happened in London in 20-19. Even then – three years after the cases in Havana – Charlie tells us the government response was still inept.
Cue, Kupperman: Unfortunately, it was very difficult to, to get these individuals into that program to be assessed. And the first thing that should have happened was to have a brain scan, an MRI … immediately so that you could get a baseline of what their brain tissue looked like.
But he says it took two more years to get them an MRI. And he’s scathing about how things were handled.
Cue, Kupperman: … there’s no central database. There’s nobody really in charge of overseeing the medical records and the medical histories of all the individuals affected by it. Uh, you’ve got a fractionated government. Everyone speaks, you know, as if it’s a priority.But I haven’t seen it being a priority, whether it’s at the State Department, the Pentagon, the National Security Council, or the Central Intelligence Agency.
He singles out the CIA for particular criticism.
Cue, Kupperman: The agency and the others were fairly skeptical and they really were hoping that this could be medically dismissed.
But, But, he says, pretty much everyone dropped the ball.
Cue, Kupperman: I can’t cite one agency that has really gone above and beyond and taken the seriousness that these individuals reported … but this should not have fallen through the cracks, and I think it did.
And I don’t believe either the Trump administration or the Biden administration has treated this as seriously as it needs to.
[BEAT]
So the US bureaucracy has failed us. We’re pointing towards an interesting theory for Havana – pulsed microwaves, the Frey Effect. But if the US government, with all its resources and manpower, can’t solve this mystery – how can I?
I reckonI need to start doing some experimenting of my own… to wrap my head around the science at play here. There are practical questions to answer. How big would a microwave device need to be to be able to do what we’re talking about here? I mean, Frey was playing with military radar dishes metres across.
Is it even possible to focus this kind of energy while keeping it secret? I mean, no one’s admitted to even seeing one, let alone catching one in the act.
So I find myself asking… could we build one?
[BEAT]
Next time on THE SOUND.
Cue, Kyle: …I mean, we can try and do it with sound. I think it’s gonna be hard. We can try and do it with microwaves, which should be a bit easier. And we can see whether it works…
Cue, Giordano: …the technological readiness level of scalable microwaves had progressed significantly over the past seven to eight years…
Cue, Kyle: …It’s gonna be a little bit dangerous.
Nicky: Yeah. I don’t think we can point it at a person, right?
Kyle: No, I don’t think I’d wanna stand in the way of that…
[BEAT into coda music]
Cue, Nicky: …uh, just to get straight to the point of it, I guess, does the U.S. have devices that can do this?
[BEAT]
Cue, Giordano: …Yes.
[BEAT]
THE SOUND is a production of Project Brazen in partnership with PRX. You can follow the show on Apple, Spotify… wherever you get your podcasts… to stay up to date on new episodes.
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THE SOUND was produced by Goat Rodeo.
Lead producer is Max Johnston.
The show was reported and written by me – Nicky Woolf – and Max Johnston.
Executive producers for Project Brazen are Bradley Hope, Tom Wright and Nicholas Brennan.
Senior Producers for Goat Rodeo are Ian Enright & Megan Nadolski.
Mixing, engineering, and additional production by Rebecca Seidel, Jonathan O’Sullivan, Emilio Polo and Javier Labrador.
Original score by the fabulous Attacca Quartet.
Additional music from Max Johnston, Ian Enright, Rebecca Seidel and Blue Dot Sessions.
Editorial and Production assistance at Goat Rodeo from Isabelle Kerby-McGowan, Cara Shillenn, Jay Venables and Megan Nadolski.
At Project Brazen, Mariangel Gonzales (Mah-ree-un-hell), Megan Dean, Susie Armitage (Arm-eh-tedge), Francesca Gilardi Quadrio Curzio, Salber Lee, Lucy Woods, Siddhartha Mahanta, and Neha Wadekar.
Our producer in Havana is Boris Crespo.
Ryan Ho is series creative director. Cover art designed by Julien Pradier (Pra-dee-yay).
Series video production by Javier Labrador, Andrija Klaric (An-dri-ya Klarr-itch), Giulia Franchi (Fran-key), Emily Chao and Nicholas Brennan.