Twitter joins the anti-Cuba movement
On the eve of a major conference to discuss the country’s deepening economic crisis, Cuba’s leadership suddenly found themselves without the use of one of social media’s most ubiquitous platforms.
The incident occurred [recently] when Twitter, utilized by more than 100 million people around the world, inexplicably shut down the accounts of Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, top journalists, news outlets and government officials, as well as Mariela Castro Espin, the daughter of Raul Castro and a vocal supporter of gay and lesbian rights as director of the National Center for Sexual Education. It was the latest aggressive act against the island nation under the Trump administration that has been rolling back all of President Obama’s 2014 openings. In the past few months Trump has increased the economic blockade, shut down the American cruise industry’s market in Cuba, and ramped up the propaganda war.
Twitter, American owned and operated out of San Francisco, initially reported the accounts were shut down for violating company protocols, then redefined the reason as due to their use for political manipulation. OnCuba reported that Twitter’s Global Communications director Ian Plunkett claimed suspended accounts were using multiple handles to artificially inflate and manipulate the importance of their tweets with interactions between these accounts. La Unión de Periodistas de Cuba (UPEC), Cuba’s journalist union, denied there being any such violations. A number of the accounts were restored in a few days, although many others remained suspended, including most of the top officials.
A more plausible explanation for the shutdown might be indicated when just prior to the suspensions Diaz-Canel issued a tweet asserting that the U.S. was using “lies, slanders and hypocrisy as the excuse of the #US Government to tighten the blockade. Because of their failure in Venezuela, they’re viciously charging against #Cuba. We shall resist and overcome.” This was in response to the announcement by the U.S. Department of the Treasury of new sanctions capping remittances and restricting “u-turn” transactions to Cuba — financial transactions that pass through the U.S. financial system but begin or end abroad. U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin stated that the new regulations would hold “the Cuban regime accountable for its oppression of the Cuban people and support of other dictatorships throughout the region.”
At the same time, Cuba’s Ministry of Health launched a Twitter campaign in the form of the hashtag #CubaPorSalud (#CubaForHealth), according to Prensa Latina. The campaign, supported by Diaz-Canel, rejected America’s claim that Cuba’s international medical missions should be classified as human trafficking.
In response to the suspension, Cuba expert Alicia Jrapko noted: “It is not a coincidence that it happened last night at the same time that Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel started explaining, on the well-watched nightly TV program Mesa Redonda, the new measures of the Trump administration against Cuba, and how it has brought about a severe shortage of diesel fuel affecting, amongst other things, the trucking of produce to market.”
According to investigative reporter Dan Cohen, shutting down the accounts was an act of aggression. Cohen (@dancohen3000) tweeted: “Twitter just suspended the accounts of the biggest media outlets in Cuba and has given no reason. This is the equivalent of silencing CNN, Fox, WaPo and NPR’s accounts, but Cuba is a target of the empire so these arbitrary suspensions don’t generate outrage.”
The incident follows a long historical effort by the American government and a compliant mainstream media to create an overwhelmingly negative narrative against Cuba. U.S. media’s first serious support for Washington’s foreign policy goal of controlling the island nation began during the 1898 Spanish-American War [name used by the United States], when the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor. The most influential newspapers of the day created a war fever among the public that resulted in America’s intervention in Cuba’s struggle for independence against Spain. The result was U.S. hegemony over Cuba, in large part justified by media portrayals of the nationals as lazy, ignorant, weak and unfit for self-governance. The storyline continued until Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution ousted American influence. Since then the media has been consistently hostile to the revolution, providing biased coverage in compliance to Washington’s regime change strategies by consistently misrepresenting, misinforming and propagandizing the social/economic realities of Cuba.
Or as commentators Robert Sandels and Nelson P. Valdes concisely described the media’s justification for the long hostility toward Cuba: “…the United States mainstream media has created a Cuba that never existed; a tropical gulag of indiscriminate terror where hordes of political prisoners rot while a cartoon dictator recites hours of his political poetry to a captive audience.”
Propaganda against Cuba maintained itself through the Bay of Pigs in 1961, when it was falsely reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Miami Herald that the invading exile force was in control of large parts of the country and that the locals were welcoming them with open arms. Later, during the case of the Cuban Five two decades ago, it was revealed that a number of Miami Herald journalists were being paid by the U.S. government to write misleading articles against the intelligence agents who were infiltrating violent anti-revolutionary organizations in Florida in order to prevent acts of terrorism. The biased reporting from the Herald journalists helped convict the agents in the hyper-charged anti-Cuban atmosphere in Miami. There’s also the case of American contractor Alan Gross who was convicted for bringing in high-tech illegal communication equipment into Cuba. The U.S. media, including the Washington Post, were outraged at the 2009 arrest, falsely claiming Gross was simply bringing in cell phones to help the Jewish community.
The information war against Cuba is as revealing for what the mainstream media hasn’t reported as much as the biased coverage it has provided. Although Cuba has faced decades of terrorist acts from certain Cuban-American organizations based in Florida, the national press has been consistently silent when it comes to informing its readership about this history. Few in the media have spent much time revealing the previous activities of such violent anti-revolutionaries as the now deceased Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. Both were long considered the masterminds of the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 that killed all 73 on board. The act remains almost entirely unknown to the general public.
Information manipulation against Cuba has now reached into the social media, with Twitter the latest incident. One of the most blatant examples is CiberCuba, a website supposedly offering balanced reporting, but that remains predominantly anti-revolutionary. As American journalist and Cuba watcher Karen Lee Wald observed, “If CiberCuba is the prime example of the Trump administration’s attempt to sabotage the Cuban revolution via the Internet, the Cubans have little to worry about.”
The suspension of accounts was not the first time Twitter became involved in a Cuban controversy. The company had previously been used to establish a social network built on texts. Named ZunZuneo, slang for a Cuban hummingbird’s tweet, the hope was it could be promoted to organize ‘smart mobs’ to trigger a Cuban spring in 2014. What few realized was the funding and operation for ZunZuneo came from USAID – the State Department organization that for years had been trying to undermine Cuban society.
U.S.: ZunZuneo was not secret, covert or classified — just ‘discreet’
At its peak, ZunZuneo drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes. Other government efforts with media manipulation included the State Department’s Internet Task Force for Cuba, which last June issued its recommendations to use the internet as a subversion highway in Cuba. It has proposed giving more funds to open digital sites, generate “attractive content” on the net, provide scholarships and finance a cyber militancy trained in harassment, lies and political assassination.
As far as the Twitter storm is concerned, Karen Lee Wald remarked, “For 60 years Cuba was able to successfully defy both the economic and the information blockades imposed by the U.S. and others who hoped to destroy the Revolution and will certainly continue to do so without Twitter.”
Keith Bolender is author of the newly published book “Manufacturing the Enemy. The media war against Cuba” (Pluto Press 2019).
