MOSCOW, April 8 (RIA Novosti)– The head of the United States Agency for International Development Rajiv Shah will be questioned over the ZunZuneo program widely known as the “Cuban Twitter,” the Associated Press reported Tuesday.
An investigation published by AP last Thursday revealed USAID sponsored a secret program, dubbed ZunZuneo, to create a “Cuban Twitter” in an effort to manipulate the country’s residents and incite political opposition to the government.
The text messaging network attracted over 40,000 people who shared news and opinions using the service. Despite the recent encouragement of cell phones in Cuba, the cost of text messaging remains high.
The questioning of the USAID administrator seeks to determine whether ZunZuneo endangered its users by concealing that the U.S. government was behind the program, AP reported.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, who dismissed the project as "dumb, dumb, dumb" will be the first to question Rajiv Shah. US lawmakers will also look into secrecy issues and try to determine whether the project should have been classified.
According to documents obtained by AP, the project aimed to first attract users by messages unrelated to politics – such as sports or music news – and only afterword introduce political context in an effort to incite anti-government demonstrations in Cuba.
The ZunZuneo program will not only arouse suspicion and mistrust in Cuba, it will do so across Latin America, Peter Hakim, president emeritus and senior fellow at Inter-American Dialogue, told RIA Novosti last week when the program was revealed.
“And it will reduce even further US influence in the Venezuela crisis,” Hakim said
“This is another American ‘orange’ technology which was earlier practiced in Ukraine, CIS countries and in Africa. There they tried to stage protests via social networks, here they allegedly created a national resource to destabilize the situation in the country,” Ruslan Gattarov, a member of the Russian Federation’s Council’s Information Policy Committee told RIA Novosti Friday.
