Cuban Government Levels Serious Charges Against El Toque

By El Toque

HAVANA TIMES – Determined not to recognize their responsibility for the crisis that’s left Cuba deep under water, the Communist Party apparatus has decided to make El Toque another scapegoat that absolves them of their failures. For several weeks now, there’s been a clear escalation of a devious campaign to implant in the Cuban people the embryo of opinion that the responsibility for the devaluation of the national currency lies with our media outlet.

Putting all hands to the task in their network of disinformation, using real profiles, but leaning heavily on spokespeople who hide behind pseudonyms, the official propaganda megaphones – Granma daily newspaper, the official website Cubadebate, and government radio and television programs – replicate messages crafted in the State Security offices. According to these messages, the rise in the price of foreign currency and the inflation are fictitious phenomena, created from outside the country.

They’ve placed emphasis on attacking the credibility of our service that monitors the informal hard currency market [a feature we call “the ElToque rate”]. They want to erode the legitimacy that this has earned as a reference point for the country. Manipulating the anxiety caused by the current crisis and the scarcity of public information, including statistics and financial processes, they are clearly focusing their efforts on packaging us as a destabilizing strategy, with the underlying aim of focusing our co-citizens’ fury and irritation on us.

The new campaign is seeking to create a consensus that could justify punitive actions and throw a smokescreen over the government’s inaction to resolve the economic crisis. The threats leveled against the team at El Toque, of applying the Cuban penal law for the supposed crimes that we’re “committing,” are accompanied by explicit calls for action against our rate estimation service, and by other discursive maneuvers to paint us as supposed “terrorists.”

They’re utilizing any lies that occur to them, and arguments that border on the ridiculous and the incredible. They’ve tried to link us to economist and intellectual Steve Hanken, with whom we’ve have absolutely no communication. It occurs to them to claim that our commercial agency CATAO has ties to a think tank like the CATO Institute, merely because the names are similar. They pull things out of context, cut, twist, and even modify the tone of voice our colleagues use in their declarations, to frame these as “evidence” in their constructs. Among such distortions, they suggest that El Toque was created by the same person who founded “Dollar Today” in Venezuela, and the monitoring initiative called “Blue Dollar” in Argentina – an assertion that’s totally false.

However, the most dangerous thing – and what we want to warn about with this declaration – is the violent turn that their accusations now taking. The growing use of terms like “financial terrorists” and the attempts to link us to supposed foreign intelligence operations could be setting the foundations for a new repressive action of the Cuban government against our platform, such as including us on their spurious “national list of terrorists.”

We say “new repressive action” because during the second half of 2022, we experienced the consequences of the amplified intervention on the part of the political police and their propaganda spokespersons. At that time, we denounced the uptick in practices of psychological torture, illegal detentions, interrogations, prohibitions of leaving the country, and public exposure in the media, which led to the resignation of our entire team in Cuba.

Two years later, in the face of their demonstrated inability to silence us, they’re launching new actions to intimidate us. We wish to sound an alert regarding possible reprisals against us that could include blocking access to our website within Cuba, an eventuality for which we’re preparing some alternatives.

We categorically deny that any members of the El Toque team are reaping benefits from the depreciation of the Cuban peso; likewise, we totally deny our participation in any conspiracy or ties to operations to provoke street demonstrations. The ones stoking social discontent in Cuba are in the Communist Party government with their failed economic policies, their abandonment of responsibility for social protection, the repression, the push to emigrate, and their insistence on clinging to power.

We’ll continue being transparent about the way we calculate our reference rates and responding to indications and criticism. We understand the anguish of being impoverished by a dictatorial regime, and the fear of directly saying so, because of the consequences that brings. But we reject the allegation that we’re the ones responsible for a situation that has a clear cause: the failed model imposed on Cuba.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.