Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez defend USAID’s ‘Cuban Twitter’ program

Posted on Thursday, 04.10.14

Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez defend USAID's 'Cuban Twitter' program
As senator Patrick Leahy calls ZunZuneo 'a cockamamie idea,' senators
Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez voice their support for the program.
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM

Defenders of a U.S. government program for Cubans fired back in the U.S.
Senate on Thursday, with Marco Rubio urging the Twitter-like platform be
restored, and Bob Menendez asking for documents on all similar programs
around the world.

Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he
wants to figure out whether the ZunZuneo platform created by the U.S.
Agency for International Development was consistent with USAID programs
for Internet freedoms in other authoritarian countries.

"Our work in Cuba is no different than our efforts to promote freedom of
expression and uncensored access to information in Ukraine, Russia,
Belarus, Iran, China or North Korea," he told a committee hearing with
USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah.

USAID's ZunZuneo program came under intense scrutiny after The
Associated Press reported that it was a "covert" effort to promote
opposition to the communist government. USAID and the White House have
rejected The AP's characterization.

With supporters of USAID's programs in Cuba saying they are legal and
necessary, and critics saying they are ineffective and wasteful, one
program supervisor who asked for anonymity said Wednesday that the
controversy "is turning into a food fight."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who chairs the Senate appropriations panel,
told Shah during a hearing with his committee Tuesday that ZunZuneo,
which allowed Cubans to send short messages to each other from 2010 to
2012, was "a cockamamie idea."

Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey and Cuban-American, says it was
"dumb, dumb, and even dumber" to suggest that Cubans don't deserve the
same freedoms as the rest of the world and took a jab at Leahy.

"Let me say for the record: When it comes to the issue of Cuba or your
work in any closed society, I do not believe that USAID's actions … are,
in any way, a 'cockamamie idea,' " he told Shah.

"You come at a time when USAID is making headlines for, in my mind,
doing nothing more than the job you were appointed to do," Menendez
said. "It is common sense that we shouldn't ask the government of Iran
or Egypt or China for permission to support advocates of free speech,
human rights, or political pluralism or to provide uncensored access to
the Internet or social media."

Rubio, a Cuban-American Republican from South Florida, said he wanted to
shoot down the "insinuation" that ZunZuneo was illegal and covert and
argued that the platform was successful, with 64,000 users before it ran
out of USAID money.

"When is the last time that we've been outraged by a government program
that undermines a tyranny and provides access to a people of a country
to the free flow of information and the ability to talk to each other,"
he asked.

"And so, my question would be, and I know this is a long-winded
question: When do we start this program again?" he said. "What do we
need to do to start, not just this program, but expand it, so that
people in Cuba can do what I just did?"

What Rubio had just done was to send a tweet that he said would have
landed him in jail if he had sent it from Cuba, where the government
blocks access to Twitter and holds a monopoly on Internet access and
telecommunications.

Rubio's tweet: "raul castro is a human rights violator &tyrant. people
of #cuba have a right to have access to internet and social media."

Source: Marco Rubio, Bob Menendez defend USAID's 'Cuban Twitter' program
- Cuba - MiamiHerald.com -
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/10/4052226/rubio-and-menendez-defend-usaids.html