Why did the US go to such great lengths to hide its involvement? You might answer that the US's checkered past in foreign policy (coups, assassinations, drug wars, oil wars, supported rebellions, etc) will make the world suspicious despite our altruistic intensions here. But I think the rest of the world's answer is simpler and more likely: our intentions are not altruistic, and this is merely another unprincipled application of power to obtain a goal. That checkered past is good evidence, and there's no reason this is different just because "social media" is a magic word or something. For example, why are we trying to undermine Cuba's regime but not Saudi's? Because our policy goals only pretend to care about dictatorships. And if we care so much about the Cuban people, why do we have a trade embargo against them?

Which is why no one trusts us and, frankly, shouldn't trust us. Building a platform that you'll use to "push them toward dissent" isn't providing a medium for free thought and reform; it's psychological warfare. We're trying to capture the attention of people and then trick them into doing what we want.

"So what?" you say. "Even if the goals are selfish and strategic, democracy is still good, and Cuba would clearly be better off without a dictator." That's certainly possible, but I doubt it. For starters, our involvement taints any actual emerging democratic movement with the notion that it's just another arm of US foreign policy. I'd like to live in a world where an asshole strong arm dictator can't blame "US meddling" for any unrest without being dismissed out of hand, but sadly, I don't live in that world. So we're really undermining that goal by playing directly into the (mostly correct) notion that the US isn't looking out for other countries' best interests. Maybe we should stop trying to interfere everywhere, because to the extent that our intentions are good in the first place, we're no good at it.

But more importantly, it's not really clear that actual democracy is the natural result of this kind of thing. If driven by US involvement, will a grassroots rebellion against the Cuban regime actually result in an open, honest democracy or will it devolve into a feeding frenzy for US interests, led by US-friendly politicians pushed into place by US operatives? The US has installed enough dictatorships and phony democracies for me to think this is more likely. When you use democracy as a veneer, I'm not sure why you'd expect it to really work.

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Cuban-American here. Helping Castro's controlled economy before giving control of the government and said economy back to its people is unpopular. Allowing the Cuban people to communicate and band together within the country is attempted all the time by government-affiliated and independent organizations, most of which are in Miami and organized by Cuban-Americans. This seems like one of those attempts, sponsored by the USAID Office of Transition Initiatives[1]. If I were in charge of the project, I figure I'd probably also avoid giving this project a U.S. brand as to not catch the attention of Cuban censors or propagandists.

Networks are fully controlled by the Cuban government. Their "Facebook" is government built.[2] There are no social networks that are optimized for the tools (like satellite phones) they use to get around censors. At first glance, this seemed like a nice attempt at helping the Cubans get around these limitations.

[1] http://www.usaid.gov/who-we-are/organization/bureaus/bureau-... [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/02/cuba-launches-faceb...

Not with the American people it doesn't seem to be [1].

[1] http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/2014cubap...

Unpopular with whom? Are you telling me that Cubans (meaning people who actually live there) support the embargo? Because that doesn't really make sense.

> If I were in charge of the project, I figure I'd probably also avoid giving this project a U.S. brand as to not catch the attention of Cuban censors or propagandists.

Yet, here were are...

> At first glance, this seemed like a nice attempt at helping the Cubans get around these limitations.

Well, making that true at first glance was the goal, right?

The people who actually live there who saw the transition have been generally supportive of US intervention in Cuba. They have been supremely disappointed in the US for their failures in their interventions (Bay of Pigs disaster, agreeing to never invade and bring down Castro, ineffective sanctions, etc.).

As you can imagine, most of the people who live there now have grown up with texts that describe the embargo in such a way that there is no way to see it as a response to the government in Cuba. The way people paint the full picture is privately through discussions, private texts, and secret communications back and forth with extended family in Miami. I hope that helps you make more sense of what conclusions can be drawn by the people there.

Not sure if your final comment was a snide attempt at saying I'm missing depth on this issue, but this issue is quite important to me and my family and one we are pretty intimate with.

If you've read carefully, you'll know I'm not arguing a solution, but simply giving you an important perspective that was surprisingly lacking for such a lengthy original post. But hey, hasn't the Internet taught me anything?

Ok, back to work now!

[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/14/opinion/la-ed-cuba15... [2] http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/2014cubap... [3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-cubans-freedom-re...

*EDITED to add link and clarify

Down vote all you want, but know that it's ignorance intentional or not that fuels the vote.

If you're interested in learning more start with this speech by Marco Rubio, he hits on hard truth. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUN7d1eYUpM

Obviously Castro is no saint, and had no qualms about repressing political dissidents (and I think those on the left in the US and Europe who hold up Cuba or Venezuela as some kind of bastions of freedom are delusional), but on the whole, Cuba actually did reasonably well for itself, especially considering the economic difficulties caused by the U.S. embargo.

My point was just that regular Cubans actually did alright, much better than US propaganda would have you believe, and better than most of the other states in the region, including those which were heavily subsidized by the US.

They could have easily ended up with a fascist police state or a civil war.

American policymakers obviously had legitimate reasons to fear anything that seemed like it might further Soviet interests, given the overall climate of the Cold War, and so as someone born in the mid 1980s I find it hard to judge their intentions and actions, after the fact. However, I tend to think that things would have turned out much better overall for everyone involved if we had kept up diplomatic and economic relations with the Castro regime right from the start, instead of basically forcing them into Soviet arms.

You could say, "But that's not a fair comparison, the USSR subsidized things that actually helped people in Cuba while the US only funded commando death squads and fruit exporters, of course Cuba had a higher standard of living".. at which point I'd ask you to review what you just wrote.

It wasn't pre-emptive or a straw man -- the poster had just (not pre-emptive) said that living standards were an unfair comparison due to USSR subsidies to Cuba (not a strawman), which is a fair point. I just pointed out that the US supported it's pet governments as well, and contrasted the USSR's approach with the USA's.

Ever read that book 'The Ugly American' back in the day? Great read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ugly_American

Jeez, another straw man. Are they really necessary?

Actually I do think that Cuba has been tragically mishandled by the US. I would have thought that trading with them and being a good example of Freedom for them would have been much better than trying to punish the dictators with perpetual embargo.

That said, I sympathize with Cuban refugees who are furious with the mistreatment of dissidents and want the US government to continue a hard line against Cuba.

You say that you did agree with me, so my apologies for attributing that view to you.

But regardless I think the tactics themselves are commendable. Speech, not guns.

That doesn't mean these leaders don't have "a claim" to power, or that you necessarily have to actively start deposing them.

Yet the only reason a democratic government does not depose an antidemocratic government is if it can't do so. And the latter is true for almost all situations. It stops to be true when there is a specific oportunity to improve the situation.

From the outside, I can also paint a bleak picture of US election process (vote fraud, electoral college, gerrymandering) and if I select the correct news, the US have a presidency bordering on dictatorship that's bent on taking basic rights from the population, and a repressive police force.

Besides, the qualification of "human-rights respecting state" might be too much if you consider recent (and not so recent) history.

You also need to focus very specifically on "repressive police force", which is easier to do in the US, where the press will hunt down these incidences like sharks will hunt blood in the water.

Transparency actually hurts the democratic image of the US, whereas Russia won't ever have these kinds of public scandals...

There was a shortage of enemies to punish, so Saddam Hussein was the next best villain. After all, he did not only have weapons of mass destruction previously, but also used them.

I actually live in a country where regime change worked emphatically well (Germany). I can't recall any such "regime change" project though were the major intent was to install democracy. In Iraq it was the WMD pretense and a diffuse sense of retaliation. In Libya it was to stop an army from shelling civilian living quarters. Mostly the intention is "just stop killing people, dammit!" And it actually works. You can never say for sure, but for example if Syria is any indication, it worked in Libya. While there are tons of problems in Syria, continued shelling and bombing of civilians isn't one of them any more.

When it comes down to it, in Cuba there's one and only one candidate for president. That's not distortion, and that's not democracy.

Exports: Many non-US countries can buy their sugar and tobacco beyond their production capacity.

Imports: most US goods are a luxury when you can import food from latin america and anything else from China.

So it doesn't make sense to say that the cubans are suffering because they don't have McDonalds, Coca-cola, Zara, Adidas and Monsanto seeds or because they don't have a market for exporting their sugar and tobacco.

The real reason we won't drop the trade embargo is that it's a very powerful bargaining chip, for whenever the Cuban government decides to talk.

Or would you say "plutocratic" does not apply to the use military force for personal profit? Because the US certainly didn't profit from your examples, even if this doesn't prove the absence of an intention to profit.

So obviously the US gains a lot of data on citizens of Cuba that could be used for other purposes.

Now it seems hating on Cuba has as much to do with winning votes in Florida than it does with corporate interests. The history is still revealing, the US has never intended Cuba to become a democracy and would not welcome a Cuban democratic state. All past and presents efforts instead focus on Cuba becoming a vassal, puppet state to US commercial interests.

The "vassal, puppet state" rethoric seems hardly helpful...

I grant you that in the cold war, the US were more interested in denying the soviets an ally on their front steps rather than to help the Cuban state to evolve. But back then there were all these puppet wars, nuclear missiles and nasty rethoric going on...

It's practically impossible to guerrilla movements to succeed without the support of the general populace. Even accounts of the revolution written by the CIA show that the majority of the population wanted the revolution to succeed. That wouldn't be the case if Batista was well loved.

Castro himself didn't expect the US to snub him as much they did. He naively thought that the US would recognize his liberation of Cuba in the same light as the US Revolutionary War. Cuba had no choice but to turn to the Soviet Union for assistance.

Again, I know Castro is not a saint, and modern Cuba is not a paradise. I merely want to point out that American interests in Cuba have rarely been aligned with the interests of the majority of Cubans.

It's also seems like a lot of what is blamed on Castro is actually just the fucked-up poisonous choices left to them due to the blockade (though, not all of it).

(Because they do it already..)

Yes.