The House of Representatives passed a law this week that would force China-based ByteDance to divest from the US version of its popular app TikTok or face a ban in the country. And while the bill’s fate in the Senate remains uncertain, plenty of politicians and members of the U.S. military establishment insist this legislation is all about protecting America’s national security. Few will get too specific about why TikTok threatens national security, but we might find an answer in Cuba, believe it or not.
Why Cuba? The U.S. launched at least two social media networks in the country in an effort to destabilize the Cuban government shortly after Fidel Castro stepped down as president in 2008—precisely the kind of thing U.S. politicians hint could happen here if China has its way.
The most famous tech service launched by the U.S. in Cuba was called ZunZuneo, a play on Cuban slang for a hummingbird’s call, and clearly a nod to Twitter’s bird-based branding. Twitter launched in 2006 but exploded in popularity by 2009, boasting over 58 million users globally. Unfortunately for the people of Cuba, they couldn’t enjoy the social media service, since it was banned in the country, but the U.S. stepped in to fill the void in 2010 with ZunZuneo, which was set up through shell corporations in Spain and the Cayman Islands.
ZunZuneo was decidedly more low-tech than Twitter, but that was largely a product of the technological constraints in Cuban communications infrastructure. Cuba only lifted a ban on cell phones in early 2008 and access to the internet was highly restricted until 2015. ZunZuneo worked by letting users send and receive messages to large groups of people through text messages, a social network design not too different from Twitter in its earliest days.
One way to think of ZunZuneo is like sending a mass text to a dozen of your friends or the parents from your kid’s Little League team and those same people are able to text the group back. It sounds incredibly simple from the vantage point of 2024, but it wasn’t something anyone could do easily in Cuba without a network like ZunZuneo. Even in the U.S., the iPhone only gained the ability to text multiple people in its second year of existence in 2008, at a time when Apple had just 1% of the market.