I had to laugh when I heard about the U.S. Agency for International Development’s botched effort to create a Twitter-like platform for Cuba intended to undermine the communist regime. Even the name — ZunZuneo — to the State Department’s credit, sounded like something cooked up in Silicon Valley, not Foggy Bottom.

The United States discreetly supported the creation of a website and SMS service that was, basically, a Cuban version of Twitter, the Associated Press reported Thursday. ZunZuneo, as it was called, permitted Cubans to broadcast short text messages to each other. At its peak, ZunZuneo had 40,000 users.