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US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

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Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#81

Post by jacobolus »

gadders wrote: post #70
jacobolus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the Cuban regime, during the period from the 1960s through at least the 1980s, Cuba did better (in terms of health, education, political stability, lack of large-scale violence, (relatively) responsive government, etc.) than most other countries in Latin America or the Caribbean, arguably largely because the US wasn’t able to replace the government with a right-wing dictatorship like the ones that domin…

For that whole period it was heavily subsidised by the USSR.

What else were they supposed to do when their next-door superpower blocked all trade, and brought substantial resources to bear on trying to undermine/destroy them? Invasion plots, assassination plots, every kind of wacky propaganda plot you can imagine (fake radio stations, leaflets dropped from planes), financial support for dissident groups, etc. etc.

My point was just that regular Cubans actually did alright, much better than US propaganda would have you believe, and better than most of the other states in the region, including those which were heavily subsidized by the US.

They could have easily ended up with a fascist police state or a civil war.

American policymakers obviously had legitimate reasons to fear anything that seemed like it might further Soviet interests, given the overall climate of the Cold War, and so as someone born in the mid 1980s I find it hard to judge their intentions and actions, after the fact. However, I tend to think that things would have turned out much better overall for everyone involved if we had kept up diplomatic and economic relations with the Castro regime right from the start, instead of basically forcing them into Soviet arms.

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#82

Post by moo »

gadders wrote: post #74
moo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human well-being, along with literacy, are Cuba's strong suit. They send doctors all over the world, such as during environmental disasters. During the 2010 Haiti earthquake, the U.S. sent troops, weird. But I guess the Haitians are free to eat mud cakes. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/29/food.internatio...

I always think that when people compliment Cuba's medical system it sounds an awful lot like people saying of Mussolini "but at least he made the trains run on time".

Did he? Well that is commendable. I also read that he was not gung-ho like hitler to round up the jews. Otherwise, yeah, the dude had to go.

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#83

Post by rickmzp »

icambron wrote: post #78
morgante wrote: post #29

I'm sure this will bring me lots of downvotes, but I actually applaud these tactics. Helping people in oppressive regimes to communicate freely with each other is one of the more humanitarian actions the US can take, and this sort of connectivity is critical in allowing people a degree of freedom even under totalitarian governments. Truly repressive regimes are out there, and without foreign interference and investme…

Strongly disagree, though I'd never downvote you for that. Why did the US go to such great lengths to hide its involvement? You might answer that the US's checkered past in foreign policy (coups, assassinations, drug wars, oil wars, supported rebellions, etc) will make the world suspicious despite our altruistic intensions here. But I think the rest of the world's answer is simpler and more likely: our intentions are…

Quoting from my original comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523278, since it seems very relevant here.

----

Cuban-American here. Helping Castro's controlled economy before giving control of the government and said economy back to its people is unpopular. Allowing the Cuban people to communicate and band together within the country is attempted all the time by government-affiliated and independent organizations, most of which are in Miami and organized by Cuban-Americans. This seems like one of those attempts, sponsored by the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives[1]. If I were in charge of the project, I figure I'd probably also avoid giving this project a U.S. brand as to not catch the attention of Cuban censors or propagandists.

Networks are fully controlled by the Cuban government. Their "Facebook" is government built.[2] There are no social networks that are optimized for the tools (like satellite phones) they use to get around censors. At first glance, this seemed like a nice attempt at helping the Cubans get around these limitations.

[1] http://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are/organization/bureaus/bureau-... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/cuba-launches-faceb...

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#84

Post by rickmzp »

tomp wrote: post #40
morgante wrote: post #29

I'm sure this will bring me lots of downvotes, but I actually applaud these tactics. Helping people in oppressive regimes to communicate freely with each other is one of the more humanitarian actions the US can take, and this sort of connectivity is critical in allowing people a degree of freedom even under totalitarian governments. Truly repressive regimes are out there, and without foreign interference and investme…

Right... as if the US could not do anything else to help Cuba and it's people. (E.g. abolishing the trade embargo.)

Cuban-American here. Helping Castro's controlled economy before giving control of the government and said economy back to its people is unpopular. Allowing the Cuban people to communicate and band together within the country is attempted all the time by government-affiliated and independent organizations, most of which are in Miami and organized by Cuban-Americans. This seems like one of those attempts, sponsored by the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives[1]. If I were in charge of the project, I figure I'd probably also avoid giving this project a U.S. brand as to not catch the attention of Cuban censors or propagandists.

Networks are fully controlled by the Cuban government. Their "Facebook" is government built.[2] There are no social networks that are optimized for the tools (like satellite phones) they use to get around censors. At first glance, this seemed like a nice attempt at helping the Cubans get around these limitations.

[1] http://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are/organization/bureaus/bureau-... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/cuba-launches-faceb...

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#85

Post by barry-cotter »

biesnecker wrote: post #2

This is such a bizarre story. It doesn't even seem like it was "the US" as much as it was an overeager and undersupervised team within USAID. It's sad, too, because USAID does good work in a lot of places around the world, and that works is undermined if (rightly or wrongly; seemingly rightly in this case) host governments think that USAID is an arm of the US intelligence community.

USAID is an arm of the US intelligence community. Every US embassy has a CIA Chief of Station. That most USAID employees and cobtractors are sincere and not officially or knowingly spies does not mean that they can really be trusted. They're agents of a foreign power and they're in your country to further its hegemony.

Remember how they found bin Laden? If they'll use a vaccination programme as a front to spy they're not going to take the "independence" or "mission" of USAID seriously.

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#86

Post by jbooth »

gadders wrote: post #70
jacobolus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair to the Cuban regime, during the period from the 1960s through at least the 1980s, Cuba did better (in terms of health, education, political stability, lack of large-scale violence, (relatively) responsive government, etc.) than most other countries in Latin America or the Caribbean, arguably largely because the US wasn’t able to replace the government with a right-wing dictatorship like the ones that domin…

For that whole period it was heavily subsidised by the USSR.

..and the right-wing juntas up and down latin america were subsidized by the US. Cuba still did better.

You could say, "But that's not a fair comparison, the USSR subsidized things that actually helped people in Cuba while the US only funded commando death squads and fruit exporters, of course Cuba had a higher standard of living".. at which point I'd ask you to review what you just wrote.

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#87

Post by smutticus »

morgante wrote: post #29

I'm sure this will bring me lots of downvotes, but I actually applaud these tactics. Helping people in oppressive regimes to communicate freely with each other is one of the more humanitarian actions the US can take, and this sort of connectivity is critical in allowing people a degree of freedom even under totalitarian governments. Truly repressive regimes are out there, and without foreign interference and investme…

The Batista regime, which came before Castro, was much worse for the people of Cuba. The US supported the Batista regime because of commercial interests. I'm not going to argue that the Castro is a saint, but the people of Cuba are definitely being treated better than had Batista stayed. No thanks to the US of course, which did everything it could to reinstitute a more corporate friendly dictator in Cuba.

Now it seems hating on Cuba has as much to do with winning votes in Florida than it does with corporate interests. The history is still revealing, the US has never intended Cuba to become a democracy and would not welcome a Cuban democratic state. All past and presents efforts instead focus on Cuba becoming a vassal, puppet state to US commercial interests.

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#88

Post by icambron »

rickmzp wrote: post #83
icambron wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree, though I'd never downvote you for that. Why did the US go to such great lengths to hide its involvement? You might answer that the US's checkered past in foreign policy (coups, assassinations, drug wars, oil wars, supported rebellions, etc) will make the world suspicious despite our altruistic intensions here. But I think the rest of the world's answer is simpler and more likely: our intentions are…

Quoting from my original comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7523278 , since it seems very relevant here. ---- Cuban-American here. Helping Castro's controlled economy before giving control of the government and said economy back to its people is unpopular. Allowing the Cuban people to communicate and band together within the country is attempted all the time by government-affiliated and independent organ…

> Helping Castro's controlled economy before giving control of the government and said economy back to its people is unpopular.

Unpopular with whom? Are you telling me that Cubans (meaning people who actually live there) support the embargo? Because that doesn't really make sense.

> If I were in charge of the project, I figure I'd probably also avoid giving this project a U.S. brand as to not catch the attention of Cuban censors or propagandists.

Yet, here were are...

> At first glance, this seemed like a nice attempt at helping the Cubans get around these limitations.

Well, making that true at first glance was the goal, right?

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#89

Post by roc »

gadders wrote: post #75
tomp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right... as if the US could not do anything else to help Cuba and it's people. (E.g. abolishing the trade embargo.)

But that would prop up the current dictatorship.

We prop up worse with less concern.

The real reason we won't drop the trade embargo is that it's a very powerful bargaining chip, for whenever the Cuban government decides to talk.

Re: US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

#90

Post by camus2 »

gadders wrote: post #72
not_paul_graham wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Muslim Brotherhood was a democratically elected party in power. The past year has been the most violent in Iraq in terms of civilian deaths and targeted attacks. A lot of my Iraqi friends mention that Iraq was more peaceful under Saddam (despite the fact that they didn't like him as the ruler). A lot of tribal leaders that supported Saddam switched alliances when the was was eminent and so a lot of these individuals…

The Muslim Brotherhood was democratically elected, I grant you, but behaved appallingly in power. Your Iraqi friends weren't Kurds, were they? Even if Iraq was more peaceful under Saddam, I expect crime is pretty low in North Korea as well. The Taliban may well be clawing back to power, and that is a truly terrible prospect for the people of Afghanistan, but their fate is in their own hands now.

> but their fate is in their own hands now.

You mean US wasted all these people for nothing along with all these american soldiers, while still giving Saudis and Pakistanis tons of money, these folks being the one that helped Al Qaida attack USA (9/11 has been financed by Pakistani's secret services,and it's a well known fact that Saudis finance the most radical islam,the one that calls USA "Satan"...).

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