After December 17, 2014, a new stage opened in the United States-Cuba conflict; The power was betting on blurring the enemy and presenting political centrism, a Third Way, as a solution.
The think tanks of this “way”, among them personalities from world politics, seek to demonize the State and the Government as elements of a contemporary society and present them as incapable of guaranteeing socioeconomic progress.
Faced with this situation, they call on citizens not to get involved in the reality of their country from a revolutionary perspective and to avoid, apparently, reactionary positions, not to polarize themselves in the political discourse of either extreme and to maintain a position of “active neutrality.” .
In this context, essentially in digital media, in the face of the resounding failures and discredit of the traditional counterrevolution, platforms emerge that present themselves as alternative, a concept that began to be used in the 1960s and encompassed social movements that occupied a space out of the conventional.
In communication, the alternative involved showing themes, approaches, images and practices of practicing journalism different from those of the mass media. However, in this media system it is an alternation to what?; because their positions, although in more subtle ways, coincide with those expressed by the large communication monopolies and the large press against Cuba.
The alternative, judging by these means, is no longer that where money is little, the hegemonic or the market is criticized; In this alternation, the so-called American way of life, the values of American-style representative democracy, are promoted, and their speech turns them into promoters of capitalist restoration.
THE ONE WHO PAYS, COMMANDS AND DOMINATES
When they emerged, in 2016, Iroel Sánchez wrote: «In recent years, a system of publications on the internet has been built, with external financing, aimed at influencing key sectors of our society so that they operate within our institutions such as Caballos de Troy based on North American interests. A media system that thousands of dollars were spent on.
El Toque, for example, received more than $200,000 from the European embassies in Havana. Among its main financiers is Norwegian Popular Aid, an NGO subordinate to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a member of the European platform Alliance 2015, whose main directors had offices in Nicaragua and financed the coup attempt in the Central American country.
The Institute of Peace and War Journalism, Factual, Distintas Latitudes, Swedish Human Rights Foundation, Editorial Hipermedia, Diario de Cuba, Cubanet and the Sergio Arboleda University have functioned as contractors for these press projects.
The National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), from the United Kingdom, and the NGO Open Society Foundations, supported by the Swedish Human Rights Foundation and the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for Latin American Journalism.
El Toque has been, since its founding, a participant in several of the media attacks against Cuba, and its discourse underlies certain structures and strategies that dismantle its impartial and apolitical presentation.
IN LOOKING FOR AN EXPLOSION
It is proven with the science of Communication: El Toque is part of the package of a 4th Generation war, which combines actions in the media-virtual and real scenarios, to open gaps that lead to confrontations and contradictions that break the people-Government unity. Game.
They do this through a very intelligent construction of discourse, which is nothing more than a specialized, mediated and institutionalized process, in which the media construct a reality, determined by a symbolic system that produces meaning; with a treatment of discourse that is evidenced in the use of specific strategies, linguistic resources and the topics they address.
How can a medium that generalizes particular facts, fundamentally negative, and makes them seen as everyone’s problem be objective? In the text I have the right to say, published in 2017, he leaves a very evident example that presents a society and, above all, a depoliticized Cuban youth, convenient to that society-governors gap that they try to build from the discourse: «Ultimately Ultimately, the depoliticization of society, and of young people in particular, is functional to the system, it allows the status quo to be maintained, it legitimizes and reproduces the established order, it does not question it.
Eternalization is also another of El Toque’s discursive strategies, and its objective is to deprive phenomena of their historical character; they are treated as permanent, which is evidenced in the phrase from the work La vida en deferido: «In Cuba it usually happens so little that expectations almost always end up being greater than the facts. The objective is to make Cuba’s problems eternal, present them without a solution and, generally, blame the Government for the situation.
How can a media that criticizes the dollar exchange rate that they have created objectively manipulate the dollar exchange rate? «There is no one to fix this, those Cubans mutter at the bus stop, in the line at the grocery store, at the school parents’ meeting. This rapid discouragement is in any case less destructive than the pernicious optimism of politicians, it causes less damage, it does not hinder the change in Cuba, it does not block it.
El Toque takes a position with the clear objective of convincing others and achieving high levels of abstentionism. «My decision is different: I am not interested in participating in an electoral process in which I no longer believe, I will not again play the farce of a vote that decides nothing, I do not intend to increase the attendance statistics without participation and real impact. This Sunday, for the first time, I make a serious political decision in Cuba: I abstain.
With this strategy they reach social networks with distorted versions about almost everything that happens on the Island. Self-titled independent or alternative, CiberCuba, adn Cuba, Cubanos por el Mundo, Cubita Now, Cubanet, Periodismo de Barrio, El Toque, El Estornudo and YucaByte have something in common: all their directors reside abroad, the majority in the United States itself, and their communication strategies end up representing the interests of the power groups in the northern country. From false neutrality, they aim to defend foreign models and criticize what is Cuban.
Along with the imposition of economic measures and the impact of the covid-19 pandemic, these media aligned themselves to discredit the management of the Cuban Government and delegitimize the social system. They oriented the opinion matrices to manage the discontent that exists, related to certain issues, and direct them against the Government, socialism, and the political system; and second, they try to promote liberal thinking in Cuba, based on liberalism, which is the ideology of capitalism.
In the last period they hide their interests less: on the one hand the discourse is more aggressive and, on the other, the direct attack on the currency makes clear the complicity of El Toque with the July 11, 2024 plan; Just as they did not hide, two years ago, to invent a repression against the demonstrations that only existed on the virtual stage.
These are just some examples that show that the construction of the discourse of the digital platform El Toque, as part of the US Government’s unconventional war strategy against Cuba, uses discursive structures and strategies that reproduce the dominant ideology in its context, which They provide meanings and stereotypes to the messages they spread on the topic of Cuba. This construction, from the topics they address to the discourse itself, is not alternative, it lacks objectivity and reproduces elements of the traditional discourse against Cuba.
Knowing this, it is too naive to believe in supposed algorithms that not even they themselves have been able to clarify, because they have the manifest purpose of intensifying the economic war and then blaming the Cuban Government for being ineffective, that is the unfair war of El Toque. What they seek, beyond the supposed price of the dollar, is to destabilize the country and destroy the Revolution.
