US Accepts Responsibility for the Creation of a 'Cuban Twitter,' but Says It Was Not an Undercover Operation

The United States government confirmed that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) proposed a social network project for Cuba with the goal of increasing information access for Cubans. Additionally, it denied that said act was part of a secret operation.

“Suggestions that this was a covert program are wrong,” clarified White House spokesperson Jay Carney in his daily press conference.

The Americans have invested thousands of dollars to create a social network similar to Twitter, called “ZunZuneo,” which was activated in Cuba with the intention of helping to destabilize the Cuban regime by way of causing social discontent.

This network, which functioned between 2010 and 2012, also served as a tool to illegally gather data from the 40,000 Cuban users that registered with it.

This information was given by the news agency Associated Press, which indicated that the funding for the creation of the social network came from the USAID program. According to the revealing story, the United States government transmitted messages to this social network from different servers distributed throughout various countries in order to make the origin of the messages difficult to locate.

From the Cayman Islands, and with the participation of Creative Associates, the elaborate plan was initiated in 2009; afterward, the Spanish company Lledia.net, a pioneer in text messages and email certificates, was put in charge of managing the sending of anonymous messages to the cell phones of Cuban users.

The lawyer Carlos Sánchez Almeida, who specializes in the Internet, confirmed to Navegante that the denounced activities in the report violate Spanish laws because “the ZunZuneo team had compiled personal information in an illegal manner, from a list of telephones, and had sent unsolicited messages through a Spanish media platform.”*

*Editor’s note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.