HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba said yesteday the United States continues to use social media to “subvert” the island’s government and that the revelation this week of a US-created, Twitter-like service for Cuba was just one of several examples.
The US government has admitted it created a social media network called ZunZuneo, which takes its name from Cuban slang for the tweet of a hummingbird. It was revealed in a report by the Associated Press, which said ZunZuneo snared cell phone users to build a network whose goals included mobilizing demonstrations.
The program, built by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) using shell companies to hide US government involvement, went dark in 2012 due to a lack of funds.
US officials confirmed it on Thursday, calling ZunZuneo a “democracy promotion” program that was neither “secret” nor “covert” under the US government’s definitions of those terms.
“The surprising denunciations made recently in an investigation by the AP, about the existence for years of a secret project of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to create a supposed Cuban Twitter … are scarcely the tip of the iceberg of a gigantic subversive campaign against Cuba,” the Union of Young Communists’ newspaper, Juventud Rebelde, reported yesterday.
