The Standing Committee created by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), has released in December 2020 the report “An Assessment of Illness in U.S. Government Employees and Their Families at Overseas Embassies”. The illness in the title refers primarily to health complaints reported by US personnel deployed in Cuba and to a lesser degree in China. The present document summarizes the Cuban Academy of Sciences’ initial assessment of the Standing Committee’ report, based on the work of a panel of Cuban experts that has spent more than two years investigating the complaints and informed by international experts including those who participated in the workshop Is there a Havana Syndrome? aptly held in Havana in March 2020.