US sent Latin youth undercover in anti-Cuba ploy

[Judi Lynn]

Last edited Mon Aug 4, 2014, 04:37 AM - Edit history (1)

US sent Latin youth undercover in anti-Cuba ploy

By DESMOND BUTLER, JACK GILLUM, ALBERTO ARCE and ANDREA RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press : August 4, 2014 : Updated: August 4, 2014 3:28am



WASHINGTON (AP) — An Obama administration program secretly dispatched young Latin Americans to Cuba using the cover of health and civic programs to provoke political change, a clandestine operation that put those foreigners in danger even after a U.S. contractor was hauled away to a Cuban jail.

Beginning as early as October 2009, a project overseen by the U.S. Agency for International Development sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian young people to Cuba in hopes of ginning up rebellion. The travelers worked undercover, often posing as tourists, and traveled around the island scouting for people they could turn into political activists.

In one case, the workers formed an HIV-prevention workshop that memos called "the perfect excuse" for the program's political goals — a gambit that could undermine America's efforts to improve health globally.

But their efforts were fraught with incompetence and risk, an Associated Press investigation found: Cuban authorities questioned who was bankrolling the travelers. The young workers nearly blew their mission to "identify potential social-change actors." One said he got a paltry, 30-minute seminar on how to evade Cuban intelligence, and there appeared to be no safety net for the inexperienced workers if they were caught.

More:
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/politics/article/US-sent-Latin-youth-undercover-in-anti-Cuba-ploy-5666288.php

[Judi Lynn]

1. USAID Hired Young Latin Americans to Incite Cuban Civil Society Revolt

Published on Monday, August 04, 2014

USAID Hired Young Latin Americans to Incite Cuban Civil Society Revolt

Participants were given little training and payed less than minimum wage, despite known danger, AP investigtion finds.

by Max Ocean, editorial intern

A program established under the Obama Administration by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) endangered about a dozen young Latin Americans by employing them to incite political revolt in Cuba by using civil society and humanitarian aid programs as fronts for the real aim of political destabilization on the Communist island, reveals an extensive new AP investigation published Monday.

The secret program "was launched during a time when newly inaugurated President Barack Obama spoke about a 'new beginning' with Cuba after decades of mistrust, raising questions about whether the White House had a coherent policy toward the island nation," according to the AP.

To help it implement the plan, USAID hired the firm Creative Associates International, the same Washington-based company that played a central role in the creation of the secret "Cuban Twitter" that the AP reported on in April.

Characterizing the program as "an operation that often teetered on disaster," the investigation's most shocking discovery was perhaps that of an attempt to recruit dissidents using "a ruse that could undermine USAID’s credibility in critical health work around the world." This "ruse" was an HIV-prevention workshop put together by one of the key hires made by Creative Associates, Fernando Murillo, the 29-year-old head of a Costa Rica-based human rights group. Murillo reported back to his employer that such a workshop was the “perfect excuse” to recruit political activists."

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/08/04/usaid-hired-young-latin-americans-incite-cuban-civil-society-revolt

[meathead]

2. That sounds pretty incompetent to me

[Blue_Tires]

3. I was shocked to see how little training they gave these 'agents'

before throwing them to the wolves, since one thing Cuba does better than *anyone* is ferret out U.S. agents...