US AID's Covert Operations in Cuba

This was a, a scandal, uh, during Obama, the Obama US

AID,

uh, era. Now we were running a number of, of rogue US AID

operations in Cuba at the time. By the way, I have to say for the record,

I'm no fan of the Cuban government.

I, I, I'm ag- And I'm not even weighing in on whether

it's the right or wrong

thing to do, you know, in terms of regime change there or,

you know, liberating people there from autocratic

excess

by that government. I'm simply showing the American people

where your tax dollars

are going and how these things are structured in order to

systematically fool you and to fool Congress and to fool the

White House. So for example, so this is, this is ...

And, and, and I'll, I'll show a couple other things in a

second here, but it ...

So this is ZunZuneo. If, yeah, if you just scroll up for a second,

we'll start with

this, right? So it was an online social media ... C-

Just scroll up one second.

We'll start at the top here. It was an online social, social networking

microblogging service created by US AID and marketed to Cuban users.

This was a, a Twitter knockoff. See, the background of this is,

this is, uh, 2009, 2014, that period, the

State Department and US AID were gangbusters gung-ho on the

promise of

Arab Spring style social media revolutions to topple other

governments. You know, that, the Arab Spring was a Facebook revolution

and a

Twitter revolution. US AID pumped $1.2 billion in,

you know, and we, we sponsored these activist groups

and these civil society

organizations to learn how to use Facebook, learn how to use Twitter, loo-

learn

how to use, uh, hashtags, learn how to

coordinate street protests so that everyone knows where to go,

what street

to show up on. You know, what kind of s- uh, slogans to, you know,

to, to use in order to create the

pro-democracy, you know, predicate for it.

But the problem was at the time Cuba did not allow US social media in.

So they said, "Hmm, so they're not allowing Twitter in.

How can we get a Twitter there, but without calling it Twitter

and without making it look like it's coming from the US?"

So what they did is they took the exact same thing as Twitter, same user

interface, same like and retweet button.

ZunZuneo, uh, is, uh, is the Cuban slang word for,

for hummingbird.

So just, it means it's, it's bird. It was the b- the Twitter bird,

the whole thing.

Um, but the whole trick about it was you have to

make it look like it's coming from the Cubans if you're going to do this

operation.

So what you'll see is,

um,

it, it began running ... Yeah, so this is 2010.

This is right, you know, during the Arab Spring.

And what you'll see is they took funds, millions of dollars of funds

that were concealed as humanitarian funds

designated for Pakistan.

Now, I don't know if

Joe or, or the audience, if you've looked at a map lately, but

Pakistan is not exactly a next door neighbor of Cuba.

Right? So and this is the, this is the Wikipedia whitewashing,

and we can get into

the deeper layers of this. But contractors funded by US AID,

I should note the

main contractor was Creative Associates International, who's a frequent one.

It's CAI. CAI, not CIA, I promise.

So they p- they concealed in the budget from Senate,

from Congress, from the White House National Security

Council.

They said that, that these were humanitarian funds for Pakistan,

and then they ran that to their contractor, CAI,

uh, to quote, "Set up a Byzantine system of front

companies

using Cayman Islands bank accounts and recruiting unsuspecting business

executives who would not be told of the company's ties to the US government,"

according to the AP.

Private companies like Creative Associates International, uh, designed the network.

The idea or, uh, arose after, uh, they were given 500,000

stolen Cuban cell phones that were available on the black market.

Um, and then what you'll see if you scroll down is, uh...

Okay, the network dubbed the, the Cuban Twitter, reached about 60,000

Cuban subscribers. The initiative appears to have also have

had a surveillance d-

dimension, allowing a, quote, "Vast database of Cuban ZunZuneo

subscribers,

including gender, age, and r- receptiveness and political tendencies to

be built,"

with the Associated Press noting such data would, could be used in the future for

political purposes. By the way, these are all in quotes from the internal

documents, and we can go through that.

The data would then be used for micro-targeting efforts towards anti and

pro-government users in Cuba. The developers aimed to at first use

non-controversial content such as sports and music and hurricane updates,

by the way. They, they used hurricane updates in the

internal things.

You know, basically a humanitarian front that

if you sign up to this app, you'll,

you'll know about natural disasters in the area.

Meanwhile, what was the plan the whole time?

Once they built up enough subscribers, they would begin to introduce political

messages through social bots and encourage dissent, uh,

in this, in this astroturfing. There's a great Guardian write-up on this.

If you, if you go to