For years, American outreach to Cuba came in many forms: mafiosos, poison-drenched wetsuits, toxic cigars. But today we learned of a new tactic in the campaign to undercut the Castro regime: a stealth effort by the U.S. government's humanitarian aid agency to create a Cuban version of Twitter.

On Thursday, the Associated Press revealed that ZunZuneo, a short-lived Cuban social-messaging service, had been secretly built and operated by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID:

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press and multiple interviews with people involved in the project, the plan was to develop a bare-bones "Cuban Twitter," using cellphone text messaging to evade Cuba's strict control of information and its stranglehold restrictions over the Internet. In a play on Twitter, it was called ZunZuneo—slang for a Cuban hummingbird's tweet. Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content": news messages on soccer, music, and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs"—mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society." At its peak, the project drew in more than 40,000 Cubans to share news and exchange opinions. But its subscribers were never aware it was created by the U.S. government, or that American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes.

The social network, which operated from 2010 to 2012, never achieved its goal of launching a "Cuban Spring" of protests similar to those that rocked Iran after a disputed presidential election in 2009. To the U.S. government's credit, its strategy of organizing protests through social media to disrupt and overthrow an authoritarian regime predated the Arab Spring by at least a year.

Then again, we shouldn't be that surprised by the news. U.S. officials have repeatedly resorted to extreme measures to undermine Fidel Castro's communist government. When Castro overthrew Cuba's U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, he initially enjoyed a honeymoon with the U.S., including an 11-day tour of New York City and Washington, D.C. in which former Secretary of State Dean Acheson hailed him as "the first democrat of Latin America." But the young revolutionary soon turned toward the Soviet Union for economic support amid tensions with the Eisenhower administration and U.S. multinational corporations, and imposed a communist dictatorship in Cuba. A series of nationalizations shortly thereafter prompted the U.S. to impose sanctions on Cuba in 1960, followed by a full embargo in 1962.

U.S. scheming against Castro began almost immediately. In 1960, CIA agents contacted high-ranking mafia officials and discussed ways to assassinate Castro, perhaps by poisoning his food and drink. The assassin they chose and supplied, Juan Orta, reportedly got cold feet and abandoned the attempt. The agency's next attempt to overthrow the Cuban regime was relatively conventional by CIA government-overthrow standards. Using Guatemala (whose own government had been toppled in a U.S.-sponsored coup in 1954) as a base of operations, U.S. spies organized, funded, armed, and trained a ragtag group of about 1,500 Cuban exiles, who planned to storm the Caribbean island and eventually topple the government. In April 1961, these exiles landed in Cuba's Bay of Pigs and were defeated within three days by Cuban military forces, embarrassing the Kennedy administration and the CIA.