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Defenders of Cuba-Twitter program have their say in U.S. Senate

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

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

Menendez (D., N.J.), 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 said 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.