Should US foment unrest in Cuba? Questions as ‘covert Twitter’ revealed

Does the US government have the right to circumvent a dictatorship's controls on information? And if Washington tries to help foster democracy in a country ruled by a dictator, is it pushing for "regime change"?

Those are the fundamental questions raised by a report on Thursday that the US Agency for International Development, USAid, financed a "covert" Twitter-like system for Cubans "designed to undermine the communist government".

White House press secretary Jay Carney said it was wrong of the report by Associated Press to brand USAid's "Zunzuneo" programme as covert. In "non-permissive environments" it is "discreet" to "protect the practitioners and the public", he said. "This is not unique to Cuba."

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said: "The notion that we were somehow trying to foment unrest … nothing could be further from the truth."

But Max Lesnik, a Miami radio commentator who supports the government of ruler Raul Castro, called Zunzuneo "an operation aimed at changing the Cuban government, regime change. This is a covert aggression through social networks."

The investigation found that the network was built in 2009 with secret shell companies and financed through a foreign bank. The project, which lasted more than two years and drew tens of thousands of subscribers, sought to evade Cuba's stranglehold on the internet with a primitive social media platform.

First, the network was to build a Cuban audience, mostly young people. Then, the plan was to push them towards dissent.