US Secretly Built “Cuban Twitter” To Topple Cuban Government By Stirring Unrest
By Countercurrents
05 April, 2014
Countercurrents.org
ZunZuneo Facebook logo,Image by @tuiteritoX>>>>>>>>>
The United States engineered a text messaging network, a “Cuban Twitter”, to spread unrest in the communist country and bring down the Castro government. The communications network was built with secret shell companies and financed through foreign banks.
The Associated Press broke the story and news organizations including NBC News and the US propaganda outlet Voice of America carried the news on April 3, 2014.
The reports said:
The US government project lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers.
It tried to evade Cuba 's Internet system with a primitive social media platform. The US designed network planned, first, to build a Cuban audience, mostly young people; then, the plan was to push them toward dissent.
It was so designed that its Cuban users were neither aware it was created by a US government agency with ties to the State Department nor that American contractors were gathering personal data about them, in the hope that the information might be used someday for political purposes.
It is not clear whether the scheme was legal under US law, which requires written authorization of covert action by the president and congressional notification.
Officials at USAID would not say who had approved the program or whether the White House was aware of it.
At minimum, details uncovered by the AP appear to muddy the US Agency for International Development's (USAID) longstanding claims that it does not conduct covert actions, and could undermine the agency's mission to deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable — an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.
USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington 's ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP.
They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a US taxpayer-funded project.
"There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement," according to a 2010 memo from Mobile Accord Inc., one of the project's creators. "This is absolutely crucial for the long-term success of the service and to ensure the success of the Mission ."
The project, dubbed "ZunZuneo," slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet, was publicly launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to the country on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology that only governments use.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and chairman of the Appropriations Committee's State Department and foreign operations subcommittee, said the ZunZuneo revelations were troubling.
"There is the risk to young, unsuspecting Cuban cellphone users who had no idea this was a US government-funded activity," he said. "There is the clandestine nature of the program that was not disclosed to the appropriations subcommittee with oversight responsibility."
In an appearance on MSNBC on Thursday, the subcommittee's chairman, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont , called the project "dumb, dumb, dumb."
The AP obtained more than 1,000 pages of documents about the project's development. It independently verified the project's scope and details in the documents through publicly available databases, government sources and interviews with those involved in ZunZuneo.
The estimated $1.6 million spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan , public government data show, but those documents don't reveal where the funds were actually spent.
For more than two years, ZunZuneo grew and reached at least 40,000 subscribers. But documents reveal the team found evidence Cuban officials tried to trace the text messages and break into the ZunZuneo system. USAID told the AP that ZunZuneo stopped in September 2012 when a government grant ended.
The documents obtained by the Associated Press state the project was led by Joe McSpedon, a US government official, who attracted a team of high-tech wizards from around the globe to set up a site that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans.
It was planned that text messaging via cellphones would help to evade the country's information system. Since Fidel Castro handed over power to his brother Raul, the use of mobile technology has been encouraged. Cubans have the opportunity to call one another or send text messages.
USAID has the image of overseeing billions of dollars in US humanitarian aid.
The initial plan was to gain users by allowing access to light news stories, such as baseball bulletins, music and weather updates. However, once a critical number of subscribers was reached, operators would introduce political stories aimed at tarnishing the reputation of the Cuban government, with the aim of creating a ‘Cuban Spring' only to rally opposition to the communist rule of Raul and Fidel Castro.
On September 20, 2009, thousands of Cubans gathered at Revolution Plaza in Havana for Miami-based Colombian rocker Juanes's ‘Peace without Borders' concert. In the weeks leading up to the concert, the ZunZuneo team sent out half a million text messages known as ‘blasts'. One question which garnered over 100,000 responses asked if two popular local music acts which were out of favor with the Cuban government should appear on stage alongside Juanes.
Critical mass was important for the USAID because, it was assumed, due to public demand, it would be much harder for the Cuban government to shut it down, while Cubacel, the cell phone company, would have seen a mass increase in their profits.
USAID staff had noted that text messaging had been a popular fuse in starting political uprisings in Moldova and the Philippines .
Interest was being lost in the project with every month that passed, and, by the summer of 2012, Cubans began to complain that the service was inconsistent, and then one day it just disappeared.
The USAID say that did not have any more money available for the project.
The US government is coming under scrutiny for funding the secretive social network designed to gather information on Cuban anti-Castro advocates and help organize social protests.
USAID and the White House say the program was a legal development project and not a covert operation.
Washington has often cited the use social media like Twitter in helping activists organize protests.
Secretary of state, Hillary Clinton praised the “American inventions” Twitter and Facebook for “helping to connect people around democracy and human rights and freedom” in places like Egypt and Tunisia .
Now, add to that list of American inventions, the now-defunct social network “ZunZuneo”, a Twitter-like service targeted specifically at Cubans with smart-phones.
According to one USAID document obtained by the AP, it was hoped ZunZuneo could “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society” in Cuba .
However, the network never proved successful enough to send any such texts.
One of those contractors, Creative Associates International of Washignton DC, told VOA it could not comment on ZunZuneo without the permission of USAID.
In an emailed statement, USAID spokesman Matt Herrick said “USAID is proud of its work in Cuba to provide basic humanitarian assistance, promote human rights and universal freedoms, and to help information flow more freely to the Cuban people."
"All of our work in Cuba , including this project, was reviewed in detail in 2013 by the Government Accountability Office and found to be consistent with US law and appropriate under oversight controls,” the statement said.
Speaking Thursday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said that ZunZuneo was a development program, and not a covert intelligence operation.
Its connection to the US government were kept discreet, he said, for the protection of its Cuban subscribers:
“This was an effort, one of a variety of efforts that the United States engages in, as part of its development mission, to promote the flow of free information, to promote the engagement by citizens of countries, especially societies that are non-permissive, because we believe that is part of the essential right of every individual on Earth,” Carney said.
The White House and USAID said the program was lawful and fully debated by Congress.
However some members of USAID's oversight committees disagree.
One of those subscribers was Ernesto Guerra Valdes, a journalism student living in Havana .
Valdes told the AP he liked using ZunZuneo and at one point had a thousand other followers on the service until it suddenly stopped operation. He said he and his friends had no idea about who was actually behind it, until now.
“If tomorrow we discover that ZunZuneo was part of USAID or some other similar project, my first reaction would be ‘Damn!'" he said. "I was on the service for so long and never realized what it really was.”
Traces of the service have largely been erased from the web. Ownership of the website zunzuneo.com has been taken over by domain proxy holding firm, leaving the site devoid of content.
There is a Facebook fan page for ZunZuneo, but with only 300-some followers and no new posts since May of 2012, it's largely inert.
Only a few archived screen-grabs of the operating site exist, mostly with instructions in Spanish of how to subscribe and send messages to friends.
Like USAID, Voice of America is funded by the US government.
Some VOA programming on health issues and entrepreneurship and some journalism training is funded by USAID.
The AP said details uncovered by its reporters appear to contradict USAID's longstanding claims it does not conduct covert actions. The report says the project could undermine the agency's mission to deliver aid to the world's poor and vulnerable, an effort that requires the trust and cooperation of foreign governments.
Havana blasts the “Cuban Twitter”
Havana has blasted Washington 's so-called ‘Cuba Twitter' as illegal and subversive, saying the United States is persisting in its decades' long plan to topple Cuba 's communist government.
Josefina Vidal, director of US affairs at Cuba's Foreign Ministry, said Thursday that the ZunZuneo program "shows once again that the US government has not renounced its plans of subversion against Cuba, which have as their aim the creation of situations of destabilization in our country to create changes in the public order and toward which it continues to devote multimillion-dollar budgets each year."
Vidal called on the US to respect international law along with the principles of the UN charter, demanding that it “cease its illegal and clandestine actions against Cuba , which are rejected by the Cuban people and international public opinion.”
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