As Twitter began to gain popularity around 15 years ago, millions of people in Cuba were looking for a similar website they could use to send short messages to the world. It was difficult to access Twitter itself because Cuba’s communist government restricted internet access, so there was a big untapped market there.
Fortunately for Cubans, an alternative quickly emerged. It was called “ZunZuneo,” which is a Cuban expression that’s supposed to sound like the noise a hummingbird makes. So we had Twitter and they had a knockoff called ZunZuneo. Even though it was a pretty cheap knock-off, however, the application quickly became popular, gaining tens of thousands of users in a matter of months. The creators of the app had obtained a list of 500,000 Cuban cell phone numbers from somewhere — presumably the black market — so they were able to pitch the program directly to users. And cell phones were the key to the whole business model: ZunZuneo was able to evade Cuba’s internet restrictions because it relied entirely on text messaging and cellular services.
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