Critics of U.S. policy towards Cuba are in high dudgeon over an Associated Press “blockbuster” story on an attempt by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to fund the start-up of a rudimentary Twitter network in Cuba. We are being led to believe that somehow the United States got “caught” in some sort of rogue “covert action” in Cuba, bringing us back to the “bad old days” of poisoned cigars and exploding shellfish targeting Fidel Castro.
Long-time embargo opponent Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), for example, went before the cameras to ask the U.S. government, “What in heaven’s name are you thinking?”
I’ll tell you what they were thinking, as I was intimately involved in USAID’s Cuba Democracy Program in the latter years of the George W. Bush administration. Back then, Congress had just tripled the program’s funding and our task was to leverage the social media revolution to break down the Castro regime’s wall of censorship placed between ordinary Cubans and the outside world, and between Cubans themselves. Our goal was to help create pockets of freedom for the Cuban people, in which their every thought and word would not be monitored by the Castro regime.
We knew that if there is one thing that dictatorial regimes feared more than freedom of expression, it was freedom of assembly. That is why the Castro regime keeps Cuba’s dissident community atomized. We wanted to take advantage of modern communications technology denied to Cubans to put them in touch with one another sans government censorship. If they wanted to discuss politics or weather it made no difference; the goal was to facilitate communication amongst them. (Although the Cuba Democracy Program was subsequently downgraded and revamped by the Obama administration, the technology focus of the Bush administration remained for some time.)
Of course, there was risk. Everyone understood the challenges and dangers of implementing such programs in a police state. But at the same time, everyone involved knew it was the right thing to do if the United States stood for anything at all in the world. (The later arrest of Alan Gross involved a mistake that should not have happened.) That the programs were implemented discreetly was precisely to protect peoples’ lives. The Castro regime has been abusing the Cuban people for five decades; no one was about to advocate advertising the details of what we were trying to accomplish on the island.
In any case, critics of U.S. policy towards Cuba have consistently mischaracterized the Cuba Democracy Program as something sinister or unprecedented. In fact, there is nothing sinister or unique about the program, which is administered by both the State Department and USAID. It is what is known within the bureaucracy as a “cross-border program” into a non-presence country — meaning we are trying to help support people living in repressive states in which we have no local development office. There are, or have been, at least six other countries in which the U.S. government runs similar cross-border programs.
Read more at: http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/04/05/theres_nothing_sinister_or_unique_about_usaids_cuba_program
Frankly, the only thing unique about the program is the level of scrutiny and criticism to which it has been subjected. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) has argued as much. “They’re trying to say that somehow it’s a bad idea to help people where Twitter and Facebook are illegal because the governments are so repressive. That’s bad?” he told USA Today . “I’m hoping we’re doing that everywhere. I’m hoping we’re doing that in North Korea, in Iran.”
Indeed, singling out one program over any of the others betrays a political motivation that undercuts the critics’ arguments — that their opposition is based more on the fact that it is viewed as an impediment to U.S.-Cuba rapprochement, because the Castro regime vehemently opposes it.
The United States has made a commitment to the Cuban people through its democracy support. And the fact that the biggest challenge to the program, other than the difficult environment, is that Cubans continue to request more and more material support to expand their independence is the best testimony to keeping the program alive.
