Was "Cuban Twitter" Dumb Or Defensible? Or Both?

Was "Cuban Twitter" Dumb Or Defensible? Or Both?
By TIM PADGETT

Confession: When I criticized ZunZuneo as the story emerged earlier this
month, I left something important unsaid.

I support its basic intent. That is, the effort to help Cubans or anyone
else access news, information and opinions that authoritarian
governments around the world try to block.

ZunZuneo was a clandestine social media program hatched in 2009 at the
federal foreign aid agency USAID. Its pro-democracy aim was to give
Cubans a Twitter-style communications network independent of their
communist government's repressive monopoly on information.

But as the Associated Press reported when it revealed ZunZuneo's
existence two weeks ago, documents suggest it was also designed to
incite popular uprising in Cuba – to inspire anti-government "smart
mobs." That's usually a job for spooks. Either way, ZunZuneo – Cuban
slang for a hummingbird's tweet – eventually failed to catch on as
widely as USAID had hoped and in 2012 it was aborted.

Having covered Cuba for 25 years, I blasted ZunZuneo on two levels.
First, I've grown weary of watching USAID try to play CIA in Cuba.
Second, I'm even wearier of Washington's insistence, after 55 years of
utter failure, that it can provoke regime change inside Cuba. There are
so many more effective ways it could foster the island's democratization
at this point.

And, yes, one of them may well be social media projects. The central
question is how best to carry out that stealth task without it
backfiring – without it looking like an official U.S. call for
rebellion, which most often ends up aiding the very despots we want to
undermine.

And, like last year's NSA revelations, that's one very important thing
about this month's ZunZuneo news: It has engendered a healthy debate
about the nature of these programs as well as U.S. policy on Cuba.

It's a discussion that was off and running on Capitol Hill almost before
the AP ink was dry. In one Senate hearing last week, Sen. Patrick Leahy
(D-Vt.) lambasted USAID and called ZunZuneo "a cockamamie idea" that
"would be so easy" for the Cuban government to discover. "This one from
the get-go had no possibility of working."

Sen. Marco Rubio, a Cuban-American, responded by calling on USAID to not
only "start this program again… but expand it, so that people in Cuba
can… speak freely to the world and to each other."

For less politics and more insight on the so-called Cuban Twitter
dispute, I talked to veteran Miami journalists Juan Tamayo, Cuba writer
for El Nuevo Herald, and Juan Vasquez, deputy editorial page editor for
the Miami Herald.

Tamayo, who examined the issue in an April 3 article, says projects like
ZunZuneo of course should have limits. But he warns that if they're too
transparent about U.S. government involvement, and if they're too
deferential to Cuban sovereignty, they're "not going to get a lot
accomplished."

TWITTER REVOLUTION?

The Cuban government, Tamayo notes, "does not like these programs. It is
going to block them, it is going to filter them out." So somewhere
"between the two extremes" of cloak-and-dagger and total openness, he
says, "someone needs to find out what's doable."

In a Herald editorial last week that supported ZunZuneo's core intent,
Vasquez recalled successful Cold War programs like Radio Free Europe. He
thinks Cuban Twitter wanted to emulate that model, the kind "that tried
to [help] people to listen to a voice other than Big Brother."

Vasquez points out, however, that ZunZuneo and its "smart mob" ambitions
may have erred in a way "similar to the early Radio Free Europe
broadcasts that some people later regretted." Namely, he says, "it might
have tried to raise false expectations or hopes" about a Cuban Spring or
some other sort of groundswell of political change.

And as Vasquez sees it, USAID probably shouldn't be flirting with the
spy business.

"I think programs that try to break the information blockade are
perfectly defensible," Vasquez says. "The issue is whether you should
have an organization like USAID sponsoring [them] ... We already have
one for this sort of thing in Langley, Va." (The CIA.) For one thing, he
says, it compromises USAID's true mission in the eyes of foreign
governments all over the world, not just Cuba's.

Tamayo too feels "a general sense that USAID is perhaps not the best
agency to be handling this." But even so, he believes the criticism of
ZunZuneo seems overheated. There are big questions, for example, about
how serious the "rise up, Cubans!" nature of the program was. And even
if it were bent on regime change, Tamayo adds:

"That Twitter can start a revolution is not only ridiculous but has been
proven wrong historically."

Congress, meanwhile, has instructed USAID to provide more documentation
to help it determine if ZunZuneo was about social revolution or merely
social media.

Tim Padgett is WLRN's Americas Editor. You can read more of his coverage
here.

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