For more than two years, a US agency secretly infiltrated Cuba’s music scene, recruiting unwitting rappers to spark a youth movement against the government, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
The idea was to use Cuban musicians to build a network of young people seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was amateurish and profoundly unsuccessful.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
They also ended up compromising Cuba’s music culture.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The program is laid out in documents involving Creative Associates International, a Washington, D.C., contractor paid millions of dollars to undermine Cuba’s government. The thousands of pages include contracts, emails, preserved chats, budgets, expense reports, power points, photographs and passports.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Creative Associates did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
The operation was initially run by a Serbian contractor Rajko Bozic. His project was inspired by the protest concerts of the student movement that helped undermine former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. <\/p>\n
Contractors would recruit scores of Cuban musicians for projects disguised as cultural initiatives but really aimed at boosting their visibility and stoking a movement of fans to challenge the government.<\/p>\n
The Serb homed in swiftly on Los Aldeanos, a popular hip-hop group.<\/p>\n
“People marching blind, you have no credibility,” the group rapped in “Long Live Free Cuba!” ”Go and tell the captain \u2014 this ship’s sinking rapidly.”<\/p>\n
Creative used a Panama front company and a bank in Lichtenstein to hide the money trail from Cuba, where thousands of dollars went to fund a TV program starring Los Aldeanos. <\/p>\n
But Cuban officials had figured out what was going on. Within months, a USAID contractor told his handlers that the Cubans said USAID had infiltrated the festival, and soon enough, the Cubans took it over.<\/p>\n
In the end, Los Aldeanos moved to South Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For more than two years, a US agency secretly infiltrated Cuba’s music scene, 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 build a network of young people seeking “social change,” documents show. But the operation was … Continue reading “US agency infiltrated Cuban music scene for ‘social change’”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,10],"tags":[844,4315,2722,10706],"class_list":["post-17204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-united-states","tag-cuba","tag-hip-hop","tag-music","tag-us-agency"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17204"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17204\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17205,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17204\/revisions\/17205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}