If President Obama thought normalizing relations with Cuba would get the Castroites to stop urinating in American diplomats' mouthwash and doing other despicable deeds against them, he was an utter fool.

CNN reports:

The US believes several State Department employees at the US embassy in Havana were subjected to an "acoustic attack" using sonic devices that left at least two with such serious health problems they needed to be brought back to the US for treatment, several senior State Department officials told CNN.

One official said the employees could have suffered permanent hearing loss as a result.

The employees affected were not at the same place at the same time, but suffered a variety of physical symptoms since late 2016 which resembled concussions.

The attacks on U.S. personnel abroad are nothing new.  U.S. prisoners of war held in Vietnam reported being tortured by Cuban agents.  U.S. diplomats abroad were targeted by Cubans during the Cold War, and even worse in the post-Cold War era, when the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba, the pre-normalization of relations diplomatic mission the U.S. had, was targeted for disgusting acts of harassment.  These acts fully reflected the mentality of what goes on in the Castroite imagination.

From a 2005 column by Carlos Alberto Montaner:

U.S. diplomat Robert Blau was met by a nauseating stench as he walked into his residence in Havana. He soon learned that security agents of the Cuban government had entered his home surreptitiously and filled it with excrement.

The authorization for that repugnant attack had come from Felipe Pérez Roque, the bellicose foreign minister, who was determined to punish the American delegation on the island for the oddest type of crime: allowing a handful of opposition democrats to gain access to the Internet for half an hour, once a week.

It wasn't the first time something like that had occurred. One of Blau's colleagues found his mouthwash had been replaced with urine. Others had their car tires slashed. Offenses and assorted types of harassment are committed almost daily. Diplomats are deprived of electricity, telephone or water at the authorities' whim.

The Miami Herald, in 2006, reported similar disgusting behavior:

U.S. diplomats tell of endlessly ringing phones and dog feces strewn inside their homes, urine-soaked towels left on a kitchen table and even poisoned family dogs. A high-ranking member of the mission once found his mouthwash replaced with urine.

Government agents follow them in public, say the Americans, and provoke them at social events. Some tell of sexual come-ons from strangers, a gambit designed to compromise them or damage their marriages.

"It's all just a reminder that they're there," said mission spokesman Drew Blakeney, who arrived in Havana last fall with his wife and child.

At a party in May, a stranger came up to Blakeney's wife and claimed that her husband was being unfaithful. Recognizing the provocation, she told the man off, Blakeney said.

He and others play down the harassment, saying the nuisances cannot compare to the government persecution that Cuban dissidents must endure.

But the persistence of the Cuban agents "makes Ceaucescu's Romania look like real amateurs," Interests Section chief Michael Parmly said, referring to the last and notoriously harsh communist ruler of Romania.

...and...

U.S. diplomats say they often come home to unpleasant surprises: furniture moved slightly, windows left open or freezers unplugged. Some have found a white powder sprinkled around their doorways and gates.

The Cuban government makes its presence known outside the Interests Section building, too. Security huts perch at each end of the complex, and guards photograph visitors from afar and demand passports before allowing people to enter.

Some of the torments seem more like the work of a poltergeist or a band of fraternity brothers than a national government.

Hawkins, who was posted earlier in South Africa and Georgia in the former Soviet Union, once found the covers torn off some matchbooks he had at home, but the intruders left the matches behind.

Now they're putting out diplomats in the hospital.

It goes to show that conceding anything to the Castro brothers is the best way of making them fouler and more aggressive.  This we saw with the renewed attacks on the Ladies in White and other dissidents, where baying "turba" mobs would scream in front of their homes and, like apes in the zoo, throw excrement at them.

Now we are seeing far more serious acts against Americans, in what go beyond harassment into full acts of war.

Relations with Cuba are not worth losing one's life over, no matter what President Obama and his intellectual author of the U.S.-Cuba one-way rapprochement, Ben Rhodes, may think.

Is it really worth it to allow the Castroites to get away with this and then watch other tyrants take note and follow suit?  Is it really worth it to let them get away with this?

It's better to just pull the plug on the Castroites, bring our diplomats back, and throw theirs out with 24 hours' notice.  Murder and maiming, no matter what the left thinks, are still murder and maiming, even if Castroites do it.  It's the opposite of diplomacy, which the left vaunts as the solution to every problem, and it's got to stop.