US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest | Hacker News Reader

US Secretly Built 'Cuban Twitter' To Stir Unrest

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152 pointstaylorbuley139 comments

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 investment people might not have any access to dissenting views.

As an example, look at the recent article from HN about Romania's brutal dictatorship.[1] VoA helped to play a major role by inspiring hope and providing alternative viewpoints within an oppressive system.

Efforts like this (bringing internet connectivity and alternative service to oppressive regimes which filter internet access) are the VoA of our times.

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26838177

Well, the US has a pretty checkered history regarding Cuba if you're going to talk about altruism. I'd say we've done more to inadvertantly prop up that regime than to undermine it. There are 3 nominally communist countries left in the world, from a high of dozens -- Cuba's one of them, and probably the closest to actually being communist (China and North Korea being technocratic-capitalist and pharaonic, respectively).

Agreed. I definitely don't think we've always had the best policies on Cuba, and also am not entirely convinced Cuba is itself the best target of this sort of effort.

But regardless I think the tactics themselves are commendable. Speech, not guns.

I think a more commendable tactic would be to not stick their oar into sovereign state's business with a mind to ruin their systems of government. I suppose not killing people is commendable, but it is pretty low bar for moral behaviour.

If you believe in democracy, you can't believe in any "moral right" or legitimacy of a non-democratic government. Castro, Assad, Putin, neither of them has a moral right to run their countries, as only a freely elected government in a human-rights respecting state can have legitimacy.

That doesn't mean these leaders don't have "a claim" to power, or that you necessarily have to actively start deposing them.

Yet the only reason a democratic government does not depose an antidemocratic government is if it can't do so. And the latter is true for almost all situations. It stops to be true when there is a specific oportunity to improve the situation.

But you need to be careful to discern what's """real""" and what's propaganda.

From the outside, I can also paint a bleak picture of US election process (vote fraud, electoral college, gerrymandering) and if I select the correct news, the US have a presidency bordering on dictatorship that's bent on taking basic rights from the population, and a repressive police force.

Besides, the qualification of "human-rights respecting state" might be too much if you consider recent (and not so recent) history.

No democracy ever has been perfect. But You need to apply some serious distortion if you want to say the US is less democratic than Russia. At the very least you have to ignore that there is no opposition in Russia, virtually no dissenting media, virtually no investigative journalism and absolutely legendary corruption.

You also need to focus very specifically on "repressive police force", which is easier to do in the US, where the press will hunt down these incidences like sharks will hunt blood in the water.

Transparency actually hurts the democratic image of the US, whereas Russia won't ever have these kinds of public scandals...

I never claimed that, for sure IMHO a good indication of a healthy democracy is presidency turnaround. But if you want to give the rights for state to intervene in the matters of another, you have to thread VERY carefully: "bring democracy to Irak" didn't work very well and the actual intentions were transparently different. tl, dr: separating a state's geopolitical interests from "helping democracy in other places" is very hard

The Iraq War wasn't about installing democracy. After 9/11 the US was in a shocked, irrational state of mind. I would hope other nations would behave differently given the same situation and power, but I have my doubts about that also.

There was a shortage of enemies to punish, so Saddam Hussein was the next best villain. After all, he did not only have weapons of mass destruction previously, but also used them.

I actually live in a country where regime change worked emphatically well (Germany). I can't recall any such "regime change" project though were the major intent was to install democracy. In Iraq it was the WMD pretense and a diffuse sense of retaliation. In Libya it was to stop an army from shelling civilian living quarters. Mostly the intention is "just stop killing people, dammit!" And it actually works. You can never say for sure, but for example if Syria is any indication, it worked in Libya. While there are tons of problems in Syria, continued shelling and bombing of civilians isn't one of them any more.

I actually meant Libya in the last sentence. Sorry. Shelling and Bombing is very much a reality there now.

I'd be the first to admit that the US isn't perfect, but we're certainly doing better at democracy than Cuba.

When it comes down to it, in Cuba there's one and only one candidate for president. That's not distortion, and that's not democracy.

Sure, but claims of moral authority to intervene are pretty weak.

Vietnam is too, in name, but is similar to China, from what I understand. Laos is communist is well, IIRC.

Vietnam and Laos are socialist countries, not communist by any means.

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 dominated most of the rest of the region.

Obviously Castro is no saint, and had no qualms about repressing political dissidents (and I think those on the left in the US and Europe who hold up Cuba or Venezuela as some kind of bastions of freedom are delusional), but on the whole, Cuba actually did reasonably well for itself, especially considering the economic difficulties caused by the U.S. embargo.

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.

..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.

Wow, a "preemptive strike straw man". You don't see that every day. :)

Apparently you feel obligated to disagree with my substance, but had to settle for attacking my writing style.

It wasn't pre-emptive or a straw man -- the poster had just (not pre-emptive) said that living standards were an unfair comparison due to USSR subsidies to Cuba (not a strawman), which is a fair point. I just pointed out that the US supported it's pet governments as well, and contrasted the USSR's approach with the USA's.

Ever read that book 'The Ugly American' back in the day? Great read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American

Apparently you want to disagree with my point

Jeez, another straw man. Are they really necessary?

Actually I do think that Cuba has been tragically mishandled by the US. I would have thought that trading with them and being a good example of Freedom for them would have been much better than trying to punish the dictators with perpetual embargo.

That said, I sympathize with Cuban refugees who are furious with the mistreatment of dissidents and want the US government to continue a hard line against Cuba.

It's pretty rare for someone to come in pointing out flaws in an argument they agree with.

You say that you did agree with me, so my apologies for attributing that view to you.

I realize this may have been an offhand remark in your post, but your description of North Korea as pharaonic is very interesting and something I hadn't thought about before. Do you have any sources comparing North Korea with the government of ancient Egypt, or is that just a comment on the country being built around one person?

Just the whole cult of personality, near-godhood thing.

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

There's no reason those options have to be mutually exclusive. Sadly, I doubt ending the trade embargo would by itself push Cuba to allow free speech and open dissent.

Contrary to building a "twitter" for them?

Well, you can't have free speech without media. Cuba first needs some economical growth, so that people get (physical) access to the internet, TV, mobile phones... Then we can talk about de-censoring their media. Also, I heard that they still have rationed food. Free speech is important, but survival is more important.

One of the key words in the article's title was "secret" and further from the article "There will be absolutely no mention of United States government involvement,". If the intention were specifically to cause unrest without drawing attention to the states, then lifting the embargo is far too public.

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.

I think the US is still holding a grudge about the little incident with the nuclear missiles, when Che Guevarra tried to convince the Soviets behind the scenes to launch a nuclear preemptive strike against the US...

Well you sure don't read the news. This is not about some old missle crisis from last century. This is about greed and expanding global putocratic control. Very similar to what's going on in Ukraine, Syria, and Libya.

One could argue that the Crimea invasion, Assad's decision to use his army to carpet bomb his citizens and Gaddafi's decision to use artillery against civilian neighbourhoods was born out of "plutocratic" reasoning.

Or would you say "plutocratic" does not apply to the use military force for personal profit? Because the US certainly didn't profit from your examples, even if this doesn't prove the absence of an intention to profit.

and here lies the problem...

The trade embargo is the best thing that happened to Cuba's government; it gives them the perfect excuse for the economic failure of comunism when actually they can trade freely with many countries.

Exports: Many non-US countries can buy their sugar and tobacco beyond their production capacity.

Imports: most US goods are a luxury when you can import food from latin america and anything else from China.

So it doesn't make sense to say that the cubans are suffering because they don't have McDonalds, Coca-cola, Zara, Adidas and Monsanto seeds or because they don't have a market for exporting their sugar and tobacco.

I know what you mean, and mostly agree with you. What they did was actually a good thing, but for the wrong reasons. I doubt that on a high-up level, this was done for the good of the everyday Cuban person.

So you'd support other governments doing it to America, then?

(Because they do it already..)

> So you'd support other governments doing it to America, then?

Yes.

I agree that parts of this tactic were beneficial in helping the people of Cuba to gain increase freedoms, but the article also mentions that these communications were being monitored and stored by the US as well.

So obviously the US gains a lot of data on citizens of Cuba that could be used for other purposes.

Bringing internet to oppressed people, great! Trying to push those people to dissent in the light of recent events seems dangerous and irresponsible, and gathering their data for "political purposes" is pretty lame. As usual I'm on the fence.

And I know I'm going to get down voted for this, but that is the most naive thing I've heard all week.

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 not altruistic, and this is merely another unprincipled application of power to obtain a goal. That checkered past is good evidence, and there's no reason this is different just because "social media" is a magic word or something. For example, why are we trying to undermine Cuba's regime but not Saudi's? Because our policy goals only pretend to care about dictatorships. And if we care so much about the Cuban people, why do we have a trade embargo against them?

Which is why no one trusts us and, frankly, shouldn't trust us. Building a platform that you'll use to "push them toward dissent" isn't providing a medium for free thought and reform; it's psychological warfare. We're trying to capture the attention of people and then trick them into doing what we want.

"So what?" you say. "Even if the goals are selfish and strategic, democracy is still good, and Cuba would clearly be better off without a dictator." That's certainly possible, but I doubt it. For starters, our involvement taints any actual emerging democratic movement with the notion that it's just another arm of US foreign policy. I'd like to live in a world where an asshole strong arm dictator can't blame "US meddling" for any unrest without being dismissed out of hand, but sadly, I don't live in that world. So we're really undermining that goal by playing directly into the (mostly correct) notion that the US isn't looking out for other countries' best interests. Maybe we should stop trying to interfere everywhere, because to the extent that our intentions are good in the first place, we're no good at it.

But more importantly, it's not really clear that actual democracy is the natural result of this kind of thing. If driven by US involvement, will a grassroots rebellion against the Cuban regime actually result in an open, honest democracy or will it devolve into a feeding frenzy for US interests, led by US-friendly politicians pushed into place by US operatives? The US has installed enough dictatorships and phony democracies for me to think this is more likely. When you use democracy as a veneer, I'm not sure why you'd expect it to really work.

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...

> 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?

Generally it has been unpopular with Cuban exiles, Cuban activists, and others in support of a free economy and free speech for Cubans. Recently there has been movement since power was transitioned to Raul that has had Cuba experiment with more economic freedoms[1]. Opinion has indeed evolved to want to open relations with Cuba in an effort to continue that trend[2]. (h/t dragonwriter for report) But even with that, there's along way to go for the Cuban people.[3]*

The people who actually live there who saw the transition have been generally supportive of US intervention in Cuba. They have been supremely disappointed in the US for their failures in their interventions (Bay of Pigs disaster, agreeing to never invade and bring down Castro, ineffective sanctions, etc.).

As you can imagine, most of the people who live there now have grown up with texts that describe the embargo in such a way that there is no way to see it as a response to the government in Cuba. The way people paint the full picture is privately through discussions, private texts, and secret communications back and forth with extended family in Miami. I hope that helps you make more sense of what conclusions can be drawn by the people there.

Not sure if your final comment was a snide attempt at saying I'm missing depth on this issue, but this issue is quite important to me and my family and one we are pretty intimate with.

If you've read carefully, you'll know I'm not arguing a solution, but simply giving you an important perspective that was surprisingly lacking for such a lengthy original post. But hey, hasn't the Internet taught me anything?

Ok, back to work now!

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/14/opinion/la-ed-cuba15... [2] http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/2014cubap... [3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-cubans-freedom-re...

*EDITED to add link and clarify

I'm originally from Miami (now in SF) I still have a house in Miami and my Wife is Cuban. What people know about Cuba and the reality of Cuba are two different things. A lot of the time the thing that keeps people from starving there are the "Micro" Aid flights that happen every day by family members of people who are still stuck on that island. And the Cuban government charges for every pound of "aid" that comes in.

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

Not with the American people it doesn't seem to be [1].

[1] http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/2014cubap...

Oooh, thanks for this! I meant it is unpopular with Cuban exiles and the surrounding community, but I am looking forward to learning more about the current state of opinion from the linked report.

Sometimes those exiles think they talk for everybody. Like that Elian circus.

I'm goin be watchin you bro. You speak too much truth.

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.

Is there any evidence that the US (whoever calls the shots, a question you conveniently left out) tried to "reinstate a corporate friendly dictator" rather than a democractic government?

The "vassal, puppet state" rethoric seems hardly helpful...

I grant you that in the cold war, the US were more interested in denying the soviets an ally on their front steps rather than to help the Cuban state to evolve. But back then there were all these puppet wars, nuclear missiles and nasty rethoric going on...

Wow, I'm speechless. You really believe that? My wife is Cuban I've spent a lot of time talking with her grandparents, parents, friends etc.. on the subject. Batista was no saint but things got 100X worse after the revolution. You won't hear the on the ground truth unless you speak with people who were there.

Worse for whom? I'm not sure your second-hand anecdotal experiences are all that representative.

Don't take my "anecdotal experiences" go, find the facts with an open mind. Many will not like what they find.

I have; it's not clear to me that the Castro regime was any more oppressive than Batista (though different people were oppressed, that's clear).

It's also seems like a lot of what is blamed on Castro is actually just the fucked-up poisonous choices left to them due to the blockade (though, not all of it).

If Batista was so great, then how was Castro able to win?

It's practically impossible to guerrilla movements to succeed without the support of the general populace. Even accounts of the revolution written by the CIA show that the majority of the population wanted the revolution to succeed. That wouldn't be the case if Batista was well loved.

The vast majority of the population did not know that after the revolution they were getting Communism. As is a common result throughout history after a revolution the people who take power are worse then those before. Batista was a bad guy, he was oppressive, but what they ended up with was a guy who was even more oppressive, their economy was even worse etc. Things did not go up and to the right after the revolution.

Isn't the stagnation of the Cuban economy atleast in part attributable to the US embargo?

Castro himself didn't expect the US to snub him as much they did. He naively thought that the US would recognize his liberation of Cuba in the same light as the US Revolutionary War. Cuba had no choice but to turn to the Soviet Union for assistance.

Again, I know Castro is not a saint, and modern Cuba is not a paradise. I merely want to point out that American interests in Cuba have rarely been aligned with the interests of the majority of Cubans.

My wife is from Cuba, you don't know the half of it, what most people hear about Cuba and the reality are two completely different things. Anything that can be done to take down that oppressive totalitarian government should be done. It's only a slight step above North Korea.

Down vote all you want, but know that it's ignorance intentional or not that fuels the vote.

If you're interested in learning more start with this speech by Marco Rubio, he hits on hard truth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUN7d1eYUpM

VoA in Romania was just propaganda giving out false hopes and giving people the illusion that by listening in secret to forbidden radio stations they were somehow fighting the regime.

Sigh.

I wouldn't necessarily mind the tactics, but I do strongly oppose USAID having anything to do with it. It's hard enough to deliver humanitarian aid to affected populations without governments also suspecting that nice eager aid worker is really there to foment revolution or collecting intelligence.

I'm really curious about this paragraph:

"...launched shortly after the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to the country on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology that only governments use."

expand internet access with technology only governments use? Is this just some shoddy reporting from a writer who doesn't understand technology or something else?

Allegedly he was carrying technology that made satellite phone calls hard to geolocate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Phillip_Gross#Background

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.

I never heard of a work of USAID that does not involve US trying to enforce his vision of politics in the country. Could you please illuminate me?

Yeah, all that crazy freedom and democracy.

Can't work out whether you are being sarcastic or not, but the notion of a free country exporting freedom and democracy is a novel one. A quick survey of history will tell you that a country A being democratic does not necessarily mean it will support countries to follow suit. Think England back in the late 1800s: Very liberal by anyone's standards at that time, but follows horrendous policies overseas.

I agree it may be a modern idea, but I don't think you can really judge current policies on those of countries from 200 years ago.

Yeah, let's force freedom and democracy down people's throat. It didn't work so well in Irak but I'm sure the next one is going to be a success ! Everyone who doesn't think like us is wrong and needs to be set on the right path anyways.

Iraq and Afghanistan are better off than they were before.

Really? Iraq lost 4% (1.45M) of it's population due to the 2003 invasion. What did the Iraqi people get in return for these 500 9/11's?

For better or worse, U.S. foreign aid and assistance are instruments of U.S. foreign policy. Just look at the list of countries and how much they receive. It's not exactly correlated to the amount of poverty and hunger among recipient countries.

"instrument of US foreign policy" != "arm of the US intelligence services"

Here's how I see it. As the government of the US relies on information mostly from US intelligence services when figuring out foreign policy, US intelligence services have a large influence on US foreign policy, and by extension it also has a substantial influence on the instruments used to implement such a policy.

What in this article associates USAID with the intel community? The fact that they both use technology?

Nothing in the article, but they have had a close association in the past. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Public_Safety

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.

I've been wondering when a government sponsored excursion into twitter astroturfing would come up...it is trivially easy to build a network of fake accounts and to have them followed by hundreds of thousands of fake accounts. As follower count is the main way that people seem to validate accounts, and Twitter has little incentive to stop puffed up accounts, how hard would it be during a revolt to fake something atrocious from the revolters' side and have it endlessly retweeted before anyone realized what happened? And that's just a brazen op...more subtle, patient intel ops could be even more pervasive.

There really aren't many tools to quickly validate accounts by sight, though showing account age would be at least one metric that is harder to fake

> it is trivially easy to build a network of fake accounts

And that's available as an off-the-shelf product of defense/intelligence contractors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntrepid

Oh, the naiveté!

I doubt anybody in their right mind and with enough information about Cuba could actually think that the Cuban government could be subverted by a social network. The government controls all communication in Cuba and they listen to it ... all the time! The minute something smells a little anti-government, it gets shut down immediately and people go to prison and are made an example on national TV.

It really does not matter where the money came from to create this network. At the end the Cuban government controlled it and there was no way it could be used for subversion. I really doubt that was the original intention of the project.

The other interesting point is this:

"... the 2009 arrest in Cuba of American contractor Alan Gross. He was imprisoned after traveling repeatedly to the country on a separate, clandestine USAID mission to expand Internet access using sensitive technology that only governments use."

This is a disguised exaggeration. The equipment Alan Gross brought to Cuba was completely normal (radios, blackberries, routers, etc) with the only alleged exception of some protection against geo-location for satellite phones.

I have to suspect the article for its bias towards Cuban propaganda.

You could read this as a cautionary tale about the difficulty in launching a social networking service: Even with $1.6 million cash (earmarked for a development project in Pakistan) and 500,000 mobile phone subscriber records (stolen from the incumbent telecom), their free service couldn't reach 5% market penetration and was shut down when it ran out of money.

But it said in the article that they decided to keep penetration under 1% of the population so as not to arouse suspicion.

Plus, they had a lot more limitations than your average Silicon Valley startup. (edit: second point)

There was simply no way to monetize the service.

That's the reason why countries like Russia and China make it so hard for NGOs to work within their borders.

I can't blame them for that, why should they allow foreign governments to stir up protests in their countries?

Is anyone better off in Libya, Syria or Egypt after the so called "Arab Spring" destabilized these countries?

The answer there may be "not yet". But Tunisia is an example of a positive outcome.

> The answer there may be "not yet"

With that argument you could justify almost anything.

Just ask yourself if you'd tolerate a coup in the US initiated by China that leads to a civil war which lasts 10 years (basically what people are experiencing in Afghanistan) and kills millions to install a type of government that China feels is better and more humane than capitalism.

That's basically what the US is doing to other countries on a regular basis.

The US Government strikes yet another blow to undermine the credibility and trustworthiness of American Internet Industry. Mission Accomplished.

I see a bad comedy where they pitch this to "secret VC's" and talk about how Cuba is simply the "beach head" with plans to expand into Venezuela next. They're raising now due to an opportunity to take huge share from Twitter in Turkey and Egypt. (where they've gone viral despite only being in Spanish)

Yeah, this could be a bad 10 minute SNL sketch or an amazingly awesome 15 minute "Whitest Kids You Know" sketch.

I think it could just be a copy/paste of this WKUK sketch in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAjrbtzr_NA

I am so disappointed. The kinds of outreach and charity provided by USAID isn't perfect, but the intent behind it was always good. Heck, if anything I'm really, really proud of the humanitarian work the U.S. government does, including USAID at State and NIH and CDC at HHS. Overthrowing governments is completely at odds with humanitarian missions, never mind the fact that the outcomes (especially in the Americas) for covert U.S. interventions in foreign governments are _not_ generally positive.

> Overthrowing governments is completely at odds with humanitarian missions

Is it? Oppressive regimes can pose a direct threat to human well-being and sometimes the best thing you can do for people's humanity is to overthrough said regime.

When are we going after the house of Saud?

> When are we going after the house of Saud?

There's actually been increased isolation from Saudi Arabia over the past year.

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...

There's more to well-being than being nominally healthy and literate.

Cuba might have great doctors, but they're not much use to political prisoners. Cubans might be literate, but they can't read whatever they want. [1]

1: https://www.hrw.org/americas/cuba

Maybe there would be more political freedom elsewhere if all the orange, red, purple revolutions weren't being orchestrated by washington.

why are all of the anti-us comments being up voted and the the reverse down voted? I feel like the voting system here on hn does nothing but push one specific agenda/view

That (or the opposite) is a sign that this is a political article, and as such should simply be flagged and removed as off-topic.

I have not down voted morgante, I want dialog. Sorry if I'm not spewing the party line.

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.

Technically no he didn't, not any more so than they normally run on time in Italy anyway. Even if we assume it was true though, should it really color our opinion of him?

I mean shit, during that time period the Germans campaigned against smoking and began construction of the autobahn. Those things were positive and are correctly credited as things that they got right, but obviously those things should not be used to justify the regime in any way.

(http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp)

Nazi crimes did not stop the U.S. from recruiting their rocket scientists and welcoming their intelligence people into the fold. I was just correcting Morgante. I'm not saying Cuba is some social paradise. But you sure seem to be comparing Cuba to Nazi Germany. Something I thought only those exiles did.

Althought strictly speaking I would say that I am comparing Mussolini to the Nazis (@gadders is the one that compared Cuba to Mussolini's Italy), I firmly believe that you can compare anything to anything.

I can compare apples to oranges ("oranges are more acidic and juicier, and apples are crunchier, although both are quite tastey"), I can compare apples to Hitler ("More people have enjoyed apples, and Hitler was a better painter than any apple that I have ever seen, although both are biological organisms") and I can certainly compare any world leader to Hitler and any government to the Nazis.

What I am certainly not doing is equating them. Mussolini's Italy and Nazi Germany were similar in many respects, and dissimilar in many other respects.

I meant compare as balance, equate. but I'm sure you understood that you pedantic ass.

I am not being pedantic, I have genuine concern about blanket objections to comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

Obviously nobody was actually equating Cuba with the Nazis. Nobody in this discussion believes that Castro is ordering the extermination of millions. Nobody in here believes that Castro wants a land war with Russia, wants to invade Poland, or has any particularly threatening military aspirations.

Nobody in this discussion even believes that Castro and Hitler are even as evil or morally bankrupt as each other, despite the obvious geographic, temporal, political, or military differences.

You of course know all of this.

The comparison that was actually made was drawing attention to perceived similarities between defenses that are mounted or have been mounted for Mussolini and Castro. (Namely, pointing out that despite all the other bad things that have been said about [subject], at least [subject] excels in one particular way. The person who made drew attention to this perceived similarity perceives a similarity because they believe the "particular way" that the subject excels is of little relative consequence in the grand scheme of all of [subject]'s actions).

I could just as easily compare my ex-boss to Mussolini: "Say what you want about [REDACTED], at least he came in to work on time." In this case my "defense" of my ex boss is actually an sarcastic quip that is meant to be critical. However obviously I am not balancing or equating an ex boss to a 20th century Fascist.

Having a train arrive on time does not equate to getting needed medical care, or having survival rights put ahead of someone else's property rights. I was not building a defencse for Cuba. I was correcting Morgante's implied point that Cuban people's well-being requires immediate action, like they are dying. On the contrary their health is much better than surrounding or any third world conditions. I corrected that. Then I'm marked as an appologist, comparable to defending hitler and mussolini which is nonsense. I don't see Cuba as a paradise. I don't see Cuba as needing to be villified as a dictatorship either when that is all what the U.S. sets up around the world. So the U.S. kidnaps Haiti's Aristide, and the place is still corrupt, still a basket case. Running to the West like the Ukraine coup plotters did does not fix things when fascists are running amuck and you are in debt with the IMF up to your ears. The freedom the U.S. govt wants for these countries is the freedom to destabilize them and once they have "our bastards" in place they look away like with Saudi Arabia, Columbia, Honduras, and Libya and people like you quickly stop squaking about freedom.

Yeah they have a great medical system! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD7mLp9j-3k

People repeat what they hear without knowing the reality. I'm sure everyone in NK has the same standard of living as Pyongyang too.

/Sarcasm

You would make a great PR rep for NSA :)

The doctors Cuba sends to other countries, The cuban government gets paid for, it's a business. They keep armed guards on them to keep them from defecting. My father in law was sent by the Cuban government to Libya in the 1980s under the same type of "work exchange" system.

This almost sounds like something that someone would make up.

Why the hell would the US Govt. want so much unrest all over the world? Haven't they learned from their screw ups in the past [0]? US supported Egyptian army is doing god knows what in Egypt; the US has been involved in the two biggest wars in recent memory (Iraq, Afghanistan), and in not-so-covert operations in countries like Pakistan, Syria and the like. Seriously what is this obsession with unrest and wars.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat#U...

This is a direct result of their (continued) fuck-ups. No one will ever be able to look favourably upon the USG again. This is quickly leading to the country's demise as a perceived 'world power'. Unfortunately, military might is next to useless in restoring reputation.

>This is quickly leading to the country's demise as a perceived 'world power'.

Oh really, is there even a single metric supporting your wishful thinking. Those hoping for the demise of the US are going to be in for a few disappointing decades, probably more.

Enemy? Spy on them.

Ally? Spy on them.

Communist regime? Overthrow it.

Democratic government? Overthrow it.

So proud to be an American.

Strong governments are an obstacle to corporate ambitions of taking over the resources of the country.

That's an unfortunately popular belief, but not the way things happen in the real world.

In the real world, corporations use and corrupt the facilities of governments to undermine restrictions on the behaviors they want while supporting restrictions on newcomers to their markets or against their customers.

Blindly strengthening government without dealing unambiguously with corruption only strengthens the weapon that these crony capitalists have to use against their competitors and customers.

Maybe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry#World.27s_largest...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arms_industry#Major_arms_indust...

It would have been more relevant if [0] were OPERATION MONGOOSE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Project

Unrest supports the war machine. Also, pushing capitalist powers expands markets for the industries lobbying government.

I think "Mercantilist" suits better than "Capitalist" here.

I think you typed "unrest" when you meant "democracy".

The Egyptian army is not perfect, but the Muslim Brotherhood was worse. Iraq and Afghanistan are also better off then they were under Saddam and the Taliban.

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 are still in power.

In certain parts of Afghanistan, the Taliban is already clawing back to power, and it is very likely that they will come to rule major parts of the country again (without continued intervention).

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"...).

The Egyption progression was military dictatorship -> revolution, elections -> elected Islamists -> everyone realising how awful Islamists are even if elected -> military dictatorship.

Turkey has been struggling with a lighter and less violent version of the same issue for a while; you can have a democratic country only until you elect a religious party determined to violate minority rights, at which point military secularism starts to look good.

I don't think the military ever really lost control. When the brotherhood stepped wrong, they were outa der.

It never seizes to amaze me that while the US treats Cuba as a hostile nation it is in conflict with, the rest of the Western world considers Cuba a holiday destination.

I wondering if this story was about North Korea and parachuting in communication devices and foreign media, if the condemnation would be equal.

Little less than a week ago I commented:

"It is no secret that the protests and revolutions in Syria, Egypt, Tunis and the like were caused by internal fabrications from American soil so they could use the uproar for settling marionettes and proper satellite states instead of having to deal with nations which are against America and [its allies]."[0]

I got down voted into oblivion but I didn't really care. I knew I was right. Hopefully all of you will realize this too, now. You really thought this is a new tactic? One case like this? Never done before? A "social experiment"?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7481111

How long has USA tried to destabilize a neighbor.

And look at Canada, one of their favorite vacation spots.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Ron_Paul...

This just sounds like Castro-Chavista propaganda and its worrying that americans and europeans are starting to buy this crap.

The idea that US government fights against communism and extreme islam is just an old lie kept alive by both left & right parties and there is enough evidence of the contrary (ie Allies surrendering eastern europe to the URSS, US backing up Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, supporting the coup against the Persian Shah and Al Qaeda).

So the truth is that communism and extreme islam are psycho-social ideological weapons designed to bring countries down - not much different than how opium was used as a weapon by the brittish.

Then Bankers, the weaponry industry, international insurance companies, and transnationals among other birds of prey enjoy doing juicy billionary businesses with the talibanized governments anywhere be it africa or latin america.

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