Why the US secretly set up ‘Cuban Twitter’ ZunZuneo

“The purpose of the ZunZuneo project was to create a platform for Cubans to speak freely among themselves, period…”

Never mind the fact that, just at the moment, the United States has a fairly dubious record for letting its own citizens and indeed people across the world “speak freely among themselves” unsupervised by the NSA.

This, according to the US government, was the stated aim of secretly setting up a social network powered by texts in Cuba which lasted from 2009 to 2012.

The network was called ZunZuneo after local slang for a hummingbird’s tweet and it provided a forum for ordinary Cubans to communicate with each other in a country where there are a number of restrictions placed on the internet.

Cubans were able to talk among themselves, and we are proud of that. USAid

It was popular: it had 40,000 subscribers at its peak, according to Associated Press, which uncovered the link after reviewing more than 1,000 documents relating to the project. But none of the users knew until now that the network was orchestrated, funded and operated by the US Agency for International Development (USAid).

For its part, USAid is pulling a bit of a Sally Bercow about its involvement in the project.

“Cubans were able to talk among themselves, and we are proud of that,” spokesman Matt Herrick said in a statement. “It is also no secret that in hostile environments, governments take steps to protect the partners we are working with on the ground.”

Or, in the language of Twitter – which ZunZuneo was clearly attempting to imitate – *innocentface*.

Balance the power

But the problem is, some of the documents seen by AP appear to suggest something rather different.

The documents suggest the plan was to build a subscriber base through “non-controversial content” – sports, news and music. Then once enough people had signed up, ZunZuneo would become more political – as the documents put it, by attempting to influence “the balance of power between the state and society”.

It’s particularly controversial because USAid has long maintained that it does not take covert action in the countries where it operates aid programmes.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, the state department’s having none of it. Spokeswoman Marie Harf said: “The notion that we were somehow trying to forment unrest, that we were trying to advance a specific political agenda or points of view – nothing could be further from the truth.”

The notion that we were somehow trying to forment unrest…nothing could be further from the truth. State department spokeswoman Marie Harf

But while it is debatable whether that was a stated aim or not – or at the very least whether anyone was silly enough to write it down in such plain language – the fact is that in the 21st century pretty much everyone is aware that Twitter and other social networks are agents for change across the globe.

They are enablers, particularly in places where communication is restricted: allowing people to talk to each other in ways they never have before; to share their anger; to get organised. Just like everybody else, the US has seen the Iranian elections and protests in 2009. It has seen the Arab Spring. In fact, it is the US government which is collecting every tweet ever sent, in the Library of Congress.

It has also seen Turkey – where Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was so frightened of Twitter and its potential that he shut it down completely ahead of local elections last month.

Read more: Seven reasons why Turkey's Twitter ban matters 

This is Twitter, or a version of it, as a political force; Twitter as the megaphone of the people; Twitter as modern democracy.

But there’s a sinister side to it too. Even a contractor involved in the project pointed out the “inherent contradiction” of giving Cubans a supposedly “free” platform, outside the influence of their government, which was actually entirely run by – um – the United States government (until it apparently ran out of money to fund the project by 2012).

Back in the 1880s, the US approach towards Latin America was described as the “Big Brother” policy, aimed at uniting countries behind the United States. What a different meaning this would have to describe US actions in one country in the region more than a century later.