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	Workers Vanguard No. 1044	18 April 2014

USAID’s Cuba Twitter Plot

#counterrevolution

On April 3 the Associated Press revealed that in 2010 the U.S. had launched a Twitter-style social networking service in Cuba with the intent of generating an army of users who could organize “smart mobs” to “renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society”—that is, overthrow the Cuban deformed workers state. The operation, eventually christened ZunZuneo (Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s tweet), buried its U.S. origins under a variety of front companies in Central America and Barcelona that were funded out of a bank account in the Cayman Islands. Offering free text messages as bait, the enterprise by March 2011 had quickly acquired 40,000 subscribers—and was quickly unearthed and disrupted by Raúl Castro’s government. By the middle of 2012, it had ceased to exist.

Predictably, ZunZuneo’s revelation has generated much handwringing and sanctimonious hogwash in the halls of Congress and in the bourgeois media, especially as this scam was run under the auspices of the “humanitarian” U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Equally predictably, this “scandal” is now under review by a Senate subcommittee in order to allow both the Senators and USAID head Rajiv Shah to deny prior knowledge of the affair. During its brief period in operation, ZunZuneo’s sole effect was to have augmented the coffers of the Cuban state-owned telecommunications company, to which it was obliged to pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees.

Since the Cuban Revolution, the U.S. imperialists have harbored revanchist counterrevolutionary ambitions toward an island that was long run as a subsidiary of the Mafia, the United Fruit Company and other American interests. Once Castro’s forces ousted the U.S.-backed Batista regime in 1959, the new government was confronted with a mounting effort from Washington to bring it to heel through economic pressure, especially after it began expropriating the holdings of major imperialist enterprises. This pressure led Castro to turn to the Soviet Union for crucial economic assistance. By 1961, Cuba was a bureaucratically deformed workers state modeled on the USSR after its degeneration under Stalin.

U.S. imperialism’s efforts to overthrow the Cuban government have been unrelenting since the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. USAID was established in November of the same year and has ever since worked hand in hand with the CIA. In 1962, the U.S. launched its ongoing embargo of Cuba. Over the years, the CIA has hatched innumerable plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The most recent serious attempt was in Panama in 2000 when it planned to put 200 pounds of explosives under a podium where Fidel was due to speak, a venture easily discovered by his security team. Also during the Bill Clinton presidency, a hallucination-driven scheme—deploying a giant mollusk stuffed with explosives to fatally interdict Fidel while he was scuba diving—was scuttled when saner minds intervened.

USAID has recently attracted some scrutiny for funneling 75 percent of the aid earmarked for earthquake relief in Haiti to U.S.-based organizations, to the dismay of the destitute Haitian masses. It also currently has a hand in imperialist intrigues in Venezuela, Ukraine and Syria. Following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, USAID gestated its own Igor, the Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI). This division issued the following mission statement: “To support U.S. foreign policy objectives by helping local partners advance peace and democracy in priority countries in crisis. Seizing critical windows of opportunity, OTI works on the ground to provide fast, flexible, short-term assistance targeted at key political transition and stabilization needs.” In other words: have gun, will travel.

As the Cuba Twitter scam was being devised, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a 2009 speech gave official blessing to this approach: “We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship” (Atlantic, April 2014). The reality is that U.S. imperialism, with its various agencies, has as its sole purpose the maintenance and expansion of its world dominance, using the guise of human rights and democracy to befuddle the American people. USAID is no more humanitarian in its operations than are the forces that invaded Iraq and Afghanistan or those that today send U.S. drones on their missions of murder.

Just before it initiated the ZunZuneo plot, USAID dispatched a contractor, Alan Gross, to smuggle spy-grade computer and satellite communications gear into Cuba. Gross was soon arrested. He is now pleading for release while complaining, with some justice, that ZunZuneo further imperiled him. To be sure, Gross’s skill set seems to resemble that of the vacuum-cleaner salesman turned spy played by Alec Guinness in Our Man in Havana.

USAID denies any responsibility for the wellbeing of those who travel to Cuba under its auspices, so Gross’s future, apparently, is his problem. Likewise for the Cuban dissidents whose names USAID sent on an unencrypted line to Cuba. In contrast, the 40,000 subscribers to ZunZuneo seem to have been guilty only of attempting to avoid the Castro regime’s constraints on communications. Nonetheless, for being caught up in USAID’s scheme, they may soon find themselves subjected to more intense attention from the Cuban government.

We stand for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state, which has good cause to subvert each and every attempt at intervention by U.S. imperialism. However, the regime’s bureaucratic dominance poses a severe threat to the overturn of the capitalist order, i.e., to the very basis of its own rule. The Castro bureaucracy is wedded to the nationalist dogma of building “socialism in one country,” a theory that set the stage for capitalist restoration in East Europe and the Soviet Union. It will require a proletarian political revolution on the island to begin on the road to a future of material abundance and personal freedom, which will come to fruition only if workers come to power internationally, not least in the U.S., the belly of the imperialist beast.