José J. Nieves is an ICFJ Knight Fellow developing resources to help newsrooms in exile plan for a sustainable future. Originally from Cuba, Nieves has been running his independent media platform El Toque from exile since 2019. 

Nieves moved his team and newsroom to Miami after they could no longer operate safely within their country. From afar, El Toque became known for an innovative tool it developed: an exchange rate calculator for the informal market in Cuba. This tool is the first of its kind for Cubans, and has greatly impacted those within the country and El Toque’s success as a publication. 
 

How long have you worked with ICFJ?

I have worked as an ICFJ Knight Fellow since April, but I have a previous story with ICFJ. I was participating in ICFJ programming. We were working closely with several ICFJ programs including an accelerator program called Velocidad run by SembraMedia of Argentina with support from ICFJ and funding from Luminate. So I have always been an admirer of ICFJ from a distance, and now I have the opportunity to work with you directly.

What inspired you to be a journalist?

Back in Cuba I always wanted to be a news anchor. When I was a teenager, I got the opportunity to work at a radio station in my city, Cienfuegos, and there I discovered I loved to be in the streets, talking to people, creating reports about what they want to denounce. So I fell in love with journalism, in that sense of social service, providing a platform for people to spread their voices and concerns.

What is something you’ve accomplished in this time that you would like to highlight?

In the initial phase of my career, being in Cuba, I wanted to do three things: I wanted to cover the visit of an American president to Cuba, the normalization process between our two countries – Cuba and the U.S. – and I also wanted to cover the death of Fidel Castro. And I did those three things.

Then, I embarked on the journalistic adventure to make sustainable and independent media work within Cuba. At that time I started to suffer from repression, harassment and legal threats. So I came to Miami in 2019 with my family and it was like “Ok, now what?” It was a huge question mark to see if I would be able to keep providing El Toque from exile.

But we were not only able to survive but grow and leave our mark. This is gonna sound tremendously self-centered, but from exile we have been able to leave our mark in the history of Cuban journalism. Because we have created something that is right now a really impactful tool. 

We created an exchange tracker in the informal currency market, so almost everyone in Cuba knows us, not by our journalism but because we offer a real-time exchange tracker. We get stories from Cuba all the time that people in taxis and restaurants and Airbnbs, people from embassies, private sector members, use our information to establish their prices. We are those people impacting so much the lives of people in Cuba, so I think this is the new accomplishment I am so proud of.

Can you describe the shift in the media environment in Cuba that forced you and your team into exile?

I mentioned these ‘happy times’ of Pharrell Williams visiting Havana, and Beyonce, and it seemed like it was possible, this new era. But in the end, it was not possible. The Cuban state is a totalitarian regime. And once they saw the effect of the Obama visit on the Cuban people and the opportunity of building something completely new, they saw that their entire discourse, and their entire ideology they built up, that they used to keep the people under control, was crumbling.

So they shut down all the normalization processes and started to blame the U.S. immediately, and after that Donald J. Trump became president. All the spaces that were open during that time started to close again by the state security police and their repressive apparatus. We, a group of young independent journalists, then started to experience in our skin what all the older generations of independent journalists have been suffering: detentions, harassment, legal threats. All that is a part of the repressive playbook of the Cuban government.

So at that point it was clear for me, it doesn't matter if you are younger or older, more objective or more activist, you will always be considered a public enemy of the Cuban regime. Right now we are all almost in exile, still operating most of the media, but of course, the Cuban government is putting in a lot of effort to cut all our ties with the field, they are trying to erase all of our connections, our network of contributors from the island, in order to make us unimportant for the Cuban people.

In a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review, you went public with threats against you from suspected Cuban state security.  What motivated you to go public with this? 

Well, imagine, the U.S. was supposedly a safe place for me and my family. And that's the main difference, once you become a parent, it's no longer an issue of you against the machine, it's also your family and children. So once I saw they were blatantly passing by the front of my home, filing with cell phones, sending it to me through Whatsapp, it was like I was no longer safe here. I needed to let authorities know what was happening. We have always been aware that the [exile] community has been penetrated by agents in the service of the Cuban regime.

The exchange rate calculator on El Toque’s website is incredibly impactful in Cuba and abroad. What led to its creation? How has this tool changed El Toque?

Necessity is the mother of all creation, as you have probably heard. With the detection in 2021 that there was a growing virtual expression of the informal market, people started to move from physical interactions to virtual interactions in spaces like social media or classified groups like Revolico [Cuban Craigslist], so people started to publish their offers of buying or selling dollars.

The Cuban government does not publish accurate exchange information, which many people rely on for daily transactions, so this tool uses the online data of the black market to provide  people with real time exchange rates. 

We launched it in June 2021, and of course, at the beginning, it was a small outreach. We were a niche media serving 100,000 per month and last June/July, we reached 900,000 a month, 100,000 users in our app, 125,000 subscribers in our YouTube channel. We are now one of the main media outlets serving Cuba.

What are you currently working on that excites you?

With ICFJ, the great opportunity this ICFJ Knight Fellowship constitutes for me is that I am now able to work on one of my main concerns, one of the drivers of my career, which is how can we make independent media in exile sustainable, and that concern is mainly because that’s my first and foremost occupation.

I want to make El Toque sustainable in a condition of exile and I have learned things doing this. So I'm working on generating resources, starting with a media podcast called “Hablando en Plata” which in Spanish means “speaking about money” but also speaking about important and concrete things. I have been interviewing people, managers of media in exile, learning from them different business models, but also talking about other issues that are equally relevant to talk about sustainability of media, not only media in exile.

Sustainability is not only an issue of financial help, of having enough money in the bank. It's a matter of how you take care of your team, and it's also a matter of how you make an impact in your home country from abroad.