If you’ve seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier this weekend and read about the “Cuban Twitter” debacle you’d suddenly feel as if “Hydra” truly exists. Reputable News outlets everywhere are reporting that the United States secretly built a Cuban version of twitter in order to create disorder and unrest. ZunZuneo, Cuban slang for a Hummingbird tweet is a text message system in which 68, 000 unsuspecting Cuban citizen were using as a means of social communication in their country. According to the AP, Zunzuneo is a tool engineered for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAid) the U.S. created to garner protests in Cuba wrapped up as a free fresh form of humanitarian assistance for the citizen to have a voice.
Zunzuneo was manufactured by companies contracted by USAid, so the average Cuban citizen may have never known that the app was U.S. Government funded, but the U.S. government knew fully what it was doing. What’s ironic is that the U.S. has sanctions on Cuba but yet the government contracted companies would have had to pay Cuban telephone companies money to make the app available to Cuban citizens with cellphone service.
The Associated Press recently put the White House on blast exposing documents which make it evident that contrary to the Obama administrations claims of the project being innocent and in no way “to encourage popular opposition to the Cuban government”.
This may become more interesting in days/weeks to come.