US secretly fed political satire to Cuba in social media_美文

US secretly fed political satire to Cuba in social media

One message read: "Latest: Cuban dies of electrical shock from laptop. 'I told you so, 'declares a satisfied Ramiro. 'Those machines are weapons of the enemy!'"

Others were marked in documents as drafts, and it was not immediately clear if they were ultimately transmitted by the service, which the government said ceased in 2017 because of a lack of funding.

USAID, known worldwide for its humanitarian work, has repeatedly maintained it did not send out political messages under the project. Leahy asked Shah whether the project's goal was to "influence political conditions abroad by gathering information about Cuban cellphone users "or "to encourage popular opposition to the Cuban government".

"No, that is not correct," Shah said. "The purpose of the program was to support access to information and to allow people to communicate with each other," he said. "It was not for the purpose you just articulated."

Last Thursday, State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said that "no political content was ever supplied by anyone working on this project or running it. It was the people -the Cuban people on the ground who were doing so".

"When it started, the folks who operated it put weather content on it, sports content on it, to get it up and running, but no political content was ever supplied by anyone working on this projector running it," she said.

However, Alen Lauzan Falcon, a Havana-born satirical artist based in Chile, said on Tuesday that he was hired to write the political texts, though he was never told about Zun Zuneo's US origins.