US officials defended on Thursday the controversial ZunZuneo Twitter-style programme aimed at Cuba.

They claimed that it had been “debated” by Congress and wasn’t a covert operation requiring White House approval. But two senior Democrats on congressional intelligence and judiciary committees said they had known nothing about it.

And Cuba’s Foreign Ministry director of US affairs Josefina Vidal said that the programme showed once again the US government “has not renounced its plans of subversion against Cuba, which have as their aim destabilisation in our country to create changes in the public order and toward which it continues to devote multimillion-dollar budgets each year.