Just as the White House celebrates Obamacare hitting its intended goal of 7 million registered healthcare signups comes word that a federal agency embarked on a social media operation two years ago to stir up political unrest in Cuba.
A news report claims the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has confessed it created a make-believe Twitter network as a way for Cuban citizens to express political messaging regarding Raul Castro, who now runs Cuba and is the brother of Fidel Castro.
The social network, called Zunzuneo (which apparently is the Cuban word for the sound of a hummingbird) allegedly got 40,000 Cuban tweeting before being discovered and shutdown, says the news account.
"It's part of our legacy of the wild and loony brainstorming we've been doing on Cuba going back to the '50s," Ann Louise Bardach, a Cuba expert and author of "Without Fidel," said Thursday in the news account.
Right off the bat the White House went on record that the Twitter operation was not a "covert" effort, with White House spokesman Jay Carney stating "suggestions that this was a covert program are wrong. In implementing programs in non-permissive environments, of course the government has taken steps to be discreet."
The revelation is likely to keep House and Senate committees busy with hearings on such government activities as it continues to investigate the National Security Agency's data and record collection and spying activities.
Lawmakers will also likely want to know how the Cuban Twitter effort may or may not have played into the arrest of Alan Gross, a USAID contractor arrested in 2010 in Cuba for "actions against the integrity of the state" and who was sentenced to 15 years in a Cuba prison. The news accounts claim the Twitter operation was launched just a few months after Gross' arrest.
The Twitter debacle is just the latest misstep for the USAID agency. One recent black mark for the organization was a GAO report citing the group had misspent $74 million.
One news report reveals that prior to the Twitter effort the U.S. has supported a radio-TV service to drive pro-democracy messages at Cuban dissidents. While Cuba's Twitter has been silenced, that effort is reportedly still active.
