Sandro Castro accused the independent media El Toque this Saturday of making over 100 million dollars in a single day following the increase in the dollar's price in the Cuban informal market.
“We see that the price of the dollar on El Toque is going up again. I already did the average calculation, and just by selling 50 dollars per person, which is not the volume for small and medium-sized enterprises, they made 128 million dollars in profit from this repurchase operation,” he said in a video shared on social media.
Sandro asserts that El Toque "has a group of journalists and buyers who go out into the streets with suitcases full of Cuban pesos to buy and sell dollars," allegedly coordinated with prices that they previously manipulate on sites like Revolico, a popular buying and selling platform on the island.
According to his account, there are two possible scenarios: "First, El Toque uses a parallel rate between 400 and 500 pesos, and they could take a brief pause at 450 CUP to manipulate the media. They are being subjected to acts of repudiation, and we have to continue fighting, we have to keep doing that," he said.
In a second hypothesis, he stated that many people who a few days ago said "no to El Toque" and forced the dollar's value to drop on the island are now buying at 440 CUP because they are becoming anxious.
"We cannot let them put us in a panic when they show price increases in red; we are the ones who decide whether to buy or not. We need to strive for them to stabilize at 450 CUP before bringing it back down to 400."
The Havana businessman also stated that the state banking system "is applying an exchange rate of 370 Cuban pesos per dollar in the hotels of Cuba," and warned: "We cannot allow the dollar to exceed 450 CUP because it will harm us all."
Finally, Sandro Castro urged the Cuban regime and government-aligned hacker groups to block the site of El Toque in Cuba by all possible means, in a call to intensify censorship against the independent media.
Additionally, he shared a list with the names of journalists and contributors to the outlet, along with the alleged roles of each, which has been reported on social media as an act of incitement to harassment.
El Toque, for its part, has not publicly responded to the allegations made by Sandro Castro, although its daily reference rate for the informal market is based on the collection of citizen data and not on direct financial operations, as the outlet itself has explained in previous statements.
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