Cuba: U.S. using spam as 'weapon'

• Cuba accuses the United States of overloading communications networks


• The accusation comes after a report revealed details of a U.S.-funded “Cuban Twitter”


• U.S. officials defend the program, saying it aimed to foster free speech in Cuba

Havana (CNN) — Cuban officials have accused the U.S. government of bizarre plots over the years, such as trying to kill Fidel Castro with exploding cigars. On Wednesday, they said Washington is using a new weapon against the island: spam.

“It’s overloading the networks, which creates bad service and affects our customers,” said Daniel Ramos Fernandez, chief of security operations at the Cuban government-run telecommunications company ETECSA.

At a news conference Wednesday, Cuban officials said text messaging platforms run by the U.S. government threatened to overwhelm Cuba’s creaky communications system and violated international conventions against junk messages.

The spam, officials claim, comes in the form of a barrage of unwanted text messages, some political in nature.

Ramos said that during a 2009 concert in Havana performed by the Colombian pop-star Juanes, a U.S. government program blanketed Cuban cell phone networks with around 300,000 text messages over aboutfive hours.

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“It was a platform created to attack Cuban networks,” Ramos said.

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