Over the last week, we've heard from AP about a secret US plan to undermine the Cuban dictatorship.   

It reminds some of us of the days of the Cold War.  Yes, the USSR and Soviet bloc are gone.  However, Castro's Cuba is still here.  The missiles and Soviet soldiers are gone but censorship and political prisons are still in the island.

I agree with The Washington Post:

"We refer to an Associated Press investigation into a short-lived U.S. program to set up an uncensored text-messaging service for the island, using the Castro regime’s own state-owned cellphone network.

The service, constructed via a series of shell companies designed to conceal its U.S. connection, enabled 40,000 Cubans, mostly tech-savvy young people, to communicate with one another.

Funding ran out in 2012.   

The AP story called this “a secret plan” “aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government,” as if there were something scandalous about undermining tyranny — and as if there were some readily available non-secret means of doing so."

There is nothing wrong with the US trying "undermine tyranny," such as the one in Cuba. Have people forgotten that Cuba is still a communist dictatorship?  Or that the Castro regime is an enemy of the US? Or that they are holding a US citizen on some bogus charges of espionage?

The critics should read from the aforementioned editorial:

"It’s one thing to question the administration’s methods in Cuba and quite another to trash its goals. The messaging service, known as Zun Zuneo, strikes us as similar in intent to U.S. government and nongovernmental aid to civil society in the Soviet bloc — including, notably, the AFL-CIO’s communications support for the Solidarity network in Poland.

Sen. Leahy mocked the Cuba program, which took place on Hillary Clinton’s watch at the State Department, as a vestige of the “Eisenhower” era.

Actually, it’s an updating of the United States’ admirable past efforts to pierce the Iron Curtain, and a rather innovative one at that. USAID pronounced itself “proud” of trying to help Cubans “speak freely among themselves,” and it should be — even if someone else probably should have gotten the assignment. 

If anyone’s stuck in the past, it’s the Castros, who insist on a level of political control that has gone out of style everywhere except Havana and Pyongyang.

Critics of the ZunZuneo program should spare some outrage for them."

Cheers for the person who started this plan to undermine the Castro regime.  Glad to see that someone in the Obama administration has a clue about the reality of the world!

P. S. You can hear CANTO TALK here & follow me on Twitter @ scantojr.