USAID once tried to weaponize Cuban rap. But maybe it wasn’t the worst idea…
For about four months now, foreign intervention has been the argument that won’t leave the room. Venezuela, then Iran, and everybody’s got a hardline position they were born with. Fine. But notice what the whole fight is actually about: it’s always military, and when it isn’t military it’s tariffs and trade deals. Bombs or money. That’s the menu.
But when it comes to “foreign intervention,” there’s a third option we almost never say out loud, and I only got here because of a tweet.
Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” has been sitting at number one forever — you’ve heard it a thousand times on the radio whether you wanted to or not. As of this week it’s spent fifteen weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100, which just passed Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” for the longest No. 1 run ever by a solo woman on a non-holiday song. Country records are occupying the entire top four of an all-genre chart that’s supposed to belong to pop and hip-hop. Somebody quote-tweeted the milestone and joked, half-serious, that “the USAID-created-hip-hop-culture conspiracy might actually be true.”
So naturally I asked: Wait, is that a thing? I know about the CIA and Jackson Pollock during the Cold War, but is that kind of thing happening in the music world?
It turns out that it’s real, or at least the seed of it. In 2014 the Associated Press reported that for roughly four years — ending in 2012 — a USAID contractor called Creative Associates International secretly ran an operation inside Cuba’s underground hip-hop scene. The goal wasn’t to slip free-market talking points into rap lyrics, as fun as that would’ve been. It was to recruit unwitting rappers, build a network of a couple hundred artists, and quietly grow a youth movement against the Castro government — modeled on the Serbian protest concerts that helped push out Milošević in 2000.
I’ll be honest about how that went, because a story that can’t survive scrutiny isn’t worth telling on air. It was a disaster. Front companies, codenames, encrypted email, a lawyer in Liechtenstein — cloak-and-dagger stuff run by people who apparently forgot Cuba has a security service. Artists got detained or interrogated, some left the country or quit performing, and one of the island’s best independent music festivals got swallowed once officials connected it to Washington. Jeff Flake and Patrick Leahy — a Republican and a Democrat, for once agreeing on something — called it “boneheaded,” “reckless,” and “stupid.” It failed completely.
So why am I telling you about a failure? Because if you clear away the incompetence and the sneaking around, there’s an instinct underneath it that isn’t stupid at all. The instinct is that culture is a lever. And in the foreign-intervention conversation, it’s the one lever we keep leaving in the drawer.
Here’s the take, and I recognize not everybody’s going to sign on: the United States is the dominant power on earth, and that comes with responsibilities we talk about constantly. Usually those responsibilities show up as aircraft carriers and trade wars — expensive, disruptive to our own way of life, and expensive… and disruptive. Did I mention expensive? Meanwhile we’re already wiring foreign aid to a long list of countries whether we like it or not. If the money’s going out the door regardless, I don’t have much of a problem with trying to point some of it at the intangible stuff: the values and the culture that actually built the greatest country in the world.
To be clear, I’m not talking about all the woke stuff from USAID that DOGE was able to uncover. Not transgender hip-hop dance theater in Brazil or a trans furry ballet class in Uganda. That’s the version that gives soft power a bad name, and it deserves ridicule. I mean genuine Western values exported to the world.
Which brings me back to Ella Langley, of all people. “Choosin’ Texas” is a love song. But her other big hit is about a woman looking at somebody she admires and wishing she could be her. And the woman she’s describing isn’t reckless or self-destructive.
“She drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle. She’s not stuck in the past, ain’t worried about tomorrow.”
She’s got a husband, a family, and her head on straight. The song spends three minutes holding up a genuinely admirable life and saying: that.
If we’re going to spend money influencing culture somewhere — and the Cuba experiment proves we already have — I’d rather export that than a color revolution run out of a Panama shell company. Do it openly, do it honestly, and aim it at the parts of Western life worth admiring.
Nobody thinks it’s an overnight fix. Nobody wakes up in Havana and decides to go free-market because a country song charted. But everything on the intervention menu takes time — the trade wars take time, the military option takes time and lives. So my only real requirement is that the objective be good and the values actually be ours, the ones that made this place worth imitating in the first place.
Do that, and you’ve got a type foreign intervention I can get behind.
