APNews | For more than two years, a U.S. agency secretly infiltrated Cuba’s
underground hip-hop movement, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a
youth movement against the government, according to documents obtained
by The Associated Press.
The idea was to use Cuban musicians “to
break the information blockade” and build a network of young people
seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was
amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.
On at least six occasions,
Cuban authorities detained or interrogated people involved in the
program; they also confiscated computer hardware, and in some cases it
contained information that jeopardized Cubans who likely had no idea
they were caught up in a clandestine U.S. operation. Still, contractors
working for the U.S. Agency for International Development kept putting
themselves and their targets at risk, the AP investigation found.
They
also ended up compromising Cuba’s vibrant hip-hop culture — which has
produced some of the hardest-hitting grassroots criticism since Fidel
Castro came to power in 1959. Artists that USAID contractors tried to
promote left the country or stopped performing after pressure from the
Cuban government, and one of the island’s most popular independent music
festivals was taken over after officials linked it to USAID.
The
program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates
International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars
to undermine Cuba’s communist government. The thousands of pages include
contracts, emails, preserved chats, budgets, expense reports, power
points, photographs and passports.
The work included the creation
of a “Cuban Twitter” social network and the dispatch of inexperienced
Latin American youth to recruit activists, operations that were the
focus of previous AP stories.
“Any assertions that our work is
secret or covert are simply false,” USAID said in a statement Wednesday.
Its programs were aimed at strengthening civil society “often in places
where civic engagement is suppressed and where people are harassed,
arrested, subjected to physical harm or worse.”
Creative Associates did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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