Doing truthful and objective journalism without being on the ground is difficult, but not impossible. “If during the pandemic the big press agencies began to report using WhatsApp, why wouldn’t we do the same?”, reasons José Jasán Nieves, general editor of El Toque, an independent media outlet that manages to tell Cuba from a “virtual newsroom” spread over seven countries.
After the “watershed” that was the protest of intellectuals in November 2020, the pressure of the Cuban government on the independent press became more and more frequent.
“That day ended the simulation of a tolerance maintained by the Cuban State Security towards ‘non-confrontational’ projects. Until then, we had opted for a more moderate discourse, while we tried to reach a broader group of people. We believed that it was our responsibility -we still believe it- to provide a balanced discourse, although it may not be to the liking of sectors on both sides”, Nieves explained to the voice of america from his residence in Miami.
A “sawed” team
El Toque was one of the first means emerged outside the state press Cuban. His multimedia way of telling the country, through the concerns of its inhabitants and in an entertaining, objective and truthful way, was what quickly distinguished him from the rest.
We saw that the government was preparing for a long time”
Their stories range from the unofficial foreign exchange rate, social dialogues in the soap opera of the day, explanations about new laws and unbiased reflections on immediate events. Over time, the reports of him began to annoy more and more an authority unaccustomed to questioning.
Then, the accumulated discontent exploded in the streets in July 2021. “J11 took the veil off a lot of people (…) For the first time, Cubans saw anti-riot forces in the streets. There we saw that the Government was preparing for a long time to repress its population and for a social outbreak of this type, ”he pointed out to the VOA Alejandro Ulloa, another of the founders of El Toque, exiled with his family in Spain.
For Ulloa, it is “very clear that journalism is not a neutral zone” but that it is “based on facts”, so to say that the Cuban government “is a dictatorial regime that represses its people and does not let them decide, does not it is leaving neutrality, it is paying attention to the facts”.
The objective reports about what was happening on the street turned the El Toque journalists into targets for Cuban security agents. “They sawed off our team in Cuba, they left us without journalists,” said Nieves.
As a result, 20 team members on the island decided to leave the medium. Nieve assures that she understands the decision they made.
“That a State security officer arrive at any time; that uses your family, to intimidate you; that they threaten you in a closed room, at low temperatures, telling you that they are going to take you to prison for 10 years; that they make you self-incriminate, denying yourself and your companions on video; to sign documents, to deny your right to live from your work with dignity. I cannot describe that in any other way than psychological torture,” said Nieves.
He himself was portrayed on Cuban state television as a “destabilizing agent.”
“We function as a virtual newsroom”
Despite the hard blow, El Toque does not want to take any “individual credit” or victimize itself. Their reality is that of many on the island, which today is experiencing one of the largest exoduses in its history.
The coup in Cuba was hard, but it didn’t stop us.”
“We are 24 members, spread over seven countries. we work on-line, as a ‘virtual’ newsroom. The coup in Cuba was hard, but it didn’t stop us. There are genres of color that we may not be able to do, but we can continue reporting, ”said Nieves, who together with his team has had to look for alternatives to reflect a reality hundreds of kilometers from their computers.
The arrival of the internet on the island made people share more and more content about the reality they live.
“What we do is like a process of social listening, of curation, of those contents. Obviously this always has a risk, as in political broadcasts, which close the shot to give the illusion of more people in an act. We always have in the subconscious that we cannot close the shot”, warned Ulloa, audiovisual coordinator for the medium.
“We have also begun to extract information from other passive sources, databases, scientific articles, reports on international cooperation projects where the government has to put information that sometimes it does not even publish within the country,” explains Nieves, who adds that they maintain alliances with other independent Cuban media such as Havana Times, Periodismo de Barrio, El Estornudo, Rialta and Cibercuba.
Sometimes being outside of Cuba proves to be beneficial. At the slightest sign of revolt, the Government disconnects the Internet service or slows it down. The journalists of The touch, especially Ulloa, remembers the “headache” that uploading a video to the website meant. “Now we can work faster and better,” he said.
With more than 47,000 subscribers on YouTube, and a combined 300,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, El Toque has maintained its vision of reporting not only for Cubans from within the island (close to 65% of its audience) but also for who, like them, have had to emigrate of their own free will or by force.
“There are many Cubans from outside the island who need to be informed as well. Those inside and outside make up the Cuban nation. I think there is much merit in doing journalism for the entire Cuban nation,” insisted Ulloa.
The Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs has not responded to a request for comment from the voice of america about this article.
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