The conflict in Ukraine came up during the Russian Foreign Minister’s visit to Cuba Tuesday.Sergei Lavrov is in Havana meeting with his Cuban counterpart.Cuba has backed Russia in the Ukraine crisis.

When Judith Faraiz's son was near death after a severe motorcycle accident, she put his life in the hands of God and Cuban doctors. 

A firm contracted by the U.S. government to help set up a Twitter-like network in Cuba held secret level security clearance and was warned the operation could involve classified work, according to documents seen by Al Jazeera.

Let’s hand it to the U.S. government: At least this disastrous attempt to overthrow the Castro brothers did not almost lead to nuclear annihilation. But its impact on activists around the world who use digital tools to organize against repressive regimes feels devastating enough.
 

The revelation that a US government-funded program set up a cellphone-based social network in Cuba is likely to pose new challenges for independent bloggers and exile groups that work to increase access to technology.

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.

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.

In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a US government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government... Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans.