U.S. Biological Warfare against Cuba: The Dengue Epidemic

U.S. Biological Warfare against Cuba: The Dengue Epidemic

For more than 20 years Cuba has been the victim of American attacks, overt and covert, large and small, unrelenting. Ships and buildings have been bombed; cane fields have been burned; invasions have been launched; and planes have been blown out of the sky.

But many of the attacks have been even less conventional. Cuba has seen its share of chemical-biological warfare - some of which has been proved, some of which has not.

If the Cuban charges are true - and we believe that this article will help demonstrate that they are - then the dengue fever epidemic of 1981 was only the latest in a long line of outrageous, immoral, and illegal chemical-biological warfare attacks against Cuba.

The History of Attacks

Many studies have been written on the chemical-biological warfare capabilities of the United States. Some have discussed specifics; some have mentioned Cuba. John Marks, Victor Marchetti, Philip Agee, and Seymour Hersh have all discussed various specifics. Shortly after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, during the early 1960s, food poisoning attempts were common, often at the same time that crop burnings were being carried out. A Washington Post report (September 16,1977) confirmed that during this time the CIA maintained an "anticrop warfare" program. Both the CIA and the army were studying biological warfare, primarily at the facilities of Fort Detrick, Maryland.

Dr. Marc Lappe noted in his book, Chemical and Biological Warfare: The Science of Public Death, that the army had a biological warfare agent prepared for use against Cuba at the time of the Missile Crisis in 1962; it was most likely Q fever.

Throughout the 1960s there were occasional biological attacks against Cuba, sometimes, according to Cuban allegations in 1964, involving apparent weather balloons. And in 1970 the CIA engineered the introduction of African swine fever into Cuba, a successful operation carried out by Cuban exile agents.

It led to the forced destruction of more than a half-million pigs. The same groups attempted unsuccessfully a few months later to infect the Cuban poultry industry. These operations were first exposed in Newsday (January 9, 1977), and later appeared in the Washington Post, Le Monde, the Guardian, and other papers.

Then, in 1980 - the year of the plagues - Cuba was beset with disasters. Another African swine fever epidemic hit; the tobacco crop was decimated by blue mold; and the sugarcane crops were hit with a particularly damaging rust disease. As The Nation put it, this was "a conjunction of plagues that would lead people less paranoid about the United States than the Cubans to wonder whether human hands had played a role in these natural disasters..."

It is against this backdrop that the Cubans found themselves facing, in the spring and summer of 1981, an unprecedented epidemic of hemorrhagic dengue fever.

Why Dengue?

As noted above, the arsenal of chemical-biological warfare is unlimited. The U.S. military and the CIA have experimented with diseases which merely make a person uncomfortable for a few hours, with toxins which kill instantly, and with everything in between.

John Marks describes a few in his study of MKULTRA, the CIA"s mind control experiment, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate."

Staphylococcal enterotoxin, for example, a mild food poisoning, would incapacitate its victim for three to six hours; Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (VEE) virus would immobilize a person for two to five days and keep its victims weak for perhaps another month; brucellosis would keep its victims in the hospital for three or more months, killing some. Even the deadly poisons were prepared with variations: shellfish toxin kills within a few seconds; botulinum, however, takes eight to 12 hours, giving the assassin time to get away.

Dengue fever is one of some 250 arthropod-borne viruses, or arboviruses, diseases transmitted from one vertebrate to another by hematophagous arthropods - blood eating insects, usually mosquitoes.

Dengue is transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the same insect which transmits yellow fever.

There are four types of dengue, numbered one through four, depending on the type of antibody which the virus induces. Normal dengue fever begins with the same symptoms as a severe cold or flu, watery eyes, runny nose, headache, backache, fever, insomnia, lack of appetite, and weakness.

The bone pain is incapacitating. Indeed, dengue was once known as "break bone." Its characteristic symptom is pain at the back of the eyes, most noticeable when looking from side to side.

All types of dengue can give rise to the hemorrhagic form, that is, accompanied by internal bleeding and shock. This form is the most dangerous, especially to children, for whom it is often fatal.

Dengue and other arboviruses are ideal as biological warfare weapons for a number of reasons.

Dengue, especially hemorrhagic dengue, is highly incapacitating; it can be transmitted easily through the introduction of infected mosquitoes; it will spread rapidly, especially in highly populated and damp areas.

The Aedes mosquito bites during the day, when people are more active and less protected; moreover, in favorable winds, Aedes mosquitoes can travel hundreds of miles before landing, none the worse for wear.

And, of course, since dengue fever is found in nature in many parts of the world, a human role in its spread is hard to detect. This is the inherent advantage of biological over chemical warfare.

The 1981 Epidemic

Although dengue fever is much more common in the Far East, there have been many outbreaks in the Caribbean and Central America during the past century. All four types have been found during the last two decades.

In 1963 there was a dengue-3 outbreak in Puerto Rico and Antigua; in 1968, dengue-2 was found in Jamaica; in 1977, dengue-1 was found in Jamaica and Cuba; and in 1981, dengue-4 was found in the Lesser Antilles.

The epidemic which hit Cuba in May 1981 was of type 2 dengue with hemorrhagic shock. Except for the type 1 epidemic reported in 1977, this was the first major dengue outbreak in Cuba since 1944, and, most importantly, the first in the Caribbean since the turn of the century to involve hemorrhagic shock on a massive scale.

From May to October 1981 there were well over 300,000 reported cases, with 158 fatalities, 101 involving children under 15. At the peak of the epidemic, in early July, more than 10,000 cases per day were being reported. More than a third of the reported victims required hospitalization. By mid-October, after a massive campaign to eradicate Aedes aegypti, the epidemic was over.

The history of the secret war against Cuba and the virulence of this dengue epidemic were enough to generate serious suspicions that the United States had a hand in the dengue epidemic of 1981. But there is much more support for those suspicions than a healthy distrust of U.S. intentions regarding Cuba.

The Clues We reviewed the reports on the epidemic of the Pan American Health Organization and of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, and interviewed a number of health officials. There are indeed indications that the epidemic was artificially induced.

The epidemic began with the simultaneous discovery in May 1981 of three cases of hemorrhagic dengue caused by a type 2 virus. The cases arose in three widely separated parts of Cuba: Cienfuegos, Camagüey, and Havana. It is extremely unusual that such an epidemic would commence in three different localities at once. None of the initial victims had ever traveled out of the country; for that matter, none of them had recently been away from home. None had had recent contact with international travelers. Moreover, a study of persons arriving in Cuba in the month of May from known dengue areas found only a dozen such passengers (from Vietnam and Laos), all of whom were checked by the Institute of Tropical Medicine and found free of the disease.

Somehow, infected mosquitoes had appeared in three provinces of Cuba at the same time. Somehow, the fever spread at an astonishing rate. There appears to be no other explanation but the artificial introduction of infected mosquitoes.

* William H. Schaap*
Third World Traveller

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