El Toque’s “crown jewel” is its exchange rate. They have gone from being an irrelevant media outlet to becoming architects of the economic war against Cuba thanks to this instrument of financial terrorism. To defend it, they rely on the supposed “transparency” of showing the data they use and the workings of their algorithm, claiming that they are “the thermometer” of the current state of the Cuban economy, not a major cause of monetary instability.
Today, irrefutable evidence of the manipulated and pseudoscientific nature of the TRMI (Reference Interest Rate) is emerging. A study carried out by Cuban scientists explains, step by step, how El Toque manipulates the exchange rate.
The masks have fallen, and there’s no way to deny reality
Lack of transparency and an insufficient sample size
Screenshot of the page where El Toque publishes information on how it calculates its manipulated exchange rate.
The investigation was conducted between November 13 and 22, 2025, by economists, specialists, and mathematical engineers from the University of Havana, taking into account the public information on the website of the foreign-funded media outlet. It delves into the large volume of data and detects irregularities that go unnoticed by the average user.
First, the sample used in practice to calculate the rate is extremely small compared to the total they declare, and it also represents a tiny fraction of the number of people who exchange money on the illegal currency market in Cuba.
They cite 141 Telegram groups, 3 WhatsApp groups, and 7 Facebook groups as sources of information. This platform is not representative of the Cuban informal market or of social discourse. Furthermore, they only use data from 47 groups on this social network, 94 fewer than officially established, and only 9 of the groups used to calculate the TRMI belong to it.
If we consider the users of both the declared groups (141) and the other 38 they use as a reference, we are faced with a population of 455,896 profiles. Of these, 7,937 have interacted directly in the groups, buying and selling foreign currency. El Toque uses the posts from only 1,838, representing 23.16% of the total. Therefore, the sample taken is not at all representative of the illegal currency market in Cuba, nor of the amount of information they claim to analyze.
On Facebook, on the other hand, they use messages from 279 groups (272 more than declared). They extract more information from some groups than others, favoring provinces with smaller populations and fewer illegal buying and selling transactions (central or eastern Cuba, such as Matanzas or Holguín). Very few groups are reported in larger provinces. For example, only 3 are identified in Havana.
It should be noted that the number of messages used as a reference each day is not fixed, but varies according to convenience. This behavior demonstrates a bias in the statistical selection.
A gap is evident between the information reported and the information actually used. There is no transparency whatsoever. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Repeated Messages and Values
The stated methodology attempts to mask a bias in the selection of the sample chosen to determine the informal exchange rate.
El Toque states on its website, on the page “What is the methodology of elTOQUE’s Representative Rate of the Informal Market?”:
We filter out duplicate ads. Our system identifies each user with a unique code (to protect their identity) and tracks the messages they post in the groups we monitor. If a user posts the same offer multiple times, whether in the same group or multiple groups simultaneously, that value is only included once in our total of processed messages over a 24-hour period. This way, we avoid artificially duplicated values.
Once again, science debunks this. They repeat values at will, regardless of whether they come from identical messages or not.
Example of message repetition
Furthermore, El Toque’s algorithm doesn’t consider a single value within a post, but rather as many as possible. In the following example, the same number was counted six times, even though it was a single post. This practice is conducive to manipulating the rate, as the repetition of values can significantly influence the median, a method used to determine the price of illegal currencies.
Example of message repetition
The criteria of high user volume are not considered for selection, while others appear repeatedly. During the research period, 24 profiles were identified that were cited between 10 and 53 times, posting according to two trends: above and below the market reference value. El Toque intentionally included one or the other group in the sample. This practice demonstrates the intentional nature of the selection.
Another important piece of data: Of the 13,623 messages available on the website, 2,991 redirected to the same El Toque page, not to their original source. In other words, the authenticity of 21.96% of the declared sample cannot be verified. Where do these messages come from? It would be naive to look for their origin in social media and not in the desire of El Toque’s owners to manipulate the dollar’s price.
Posts from the day before? Another fallacy
Let’s return to the mercenary argument. The website “Cuban Currency Exchange Rates Today” claims to determine the exchange rate by comparing “messages from the last 24 hours before the data is published with the values from the previous day.”
The study also refutes this claim. That’s right: They use data from previous days, even months, to determine the daily informal rate. In other words, to set today’s exchange rate, they don’t just use yesterday’s figures; you might even find posts from last May.
An analysis of data from November 26, focused on Facebook groups, clearly demonstrates this. Of a total of 265 posts on this social network, 46.7% were invalid, either due to a lack of authenticity or because they weren’t from the previous 24 hours.
Multiple examples illustrate the use of old posts to manipulate the exchange rate to their advantage.
In short, they identify the highest values to establish the informal exchange rate, and to do this, they use messages from specific users as many times as necessary, even if they are repeated or date back months. The blatant manipulation is obvious. Anything to raise the price of the dollar on the informal market.
Detection of Automated Behavior
As if that weren’t enough, specialists detected signs of bot use in the messages, including:
Texts with identical structure, where only the values are modified.
Use of programming symbols (*), commas, periods, and emojis in key places to identify values, which is often used to facilitate technological text analysis processes.
Messages with very similar structure, including repeated emoji patterns, sent by different users.
Identical posts sent in different groups at the exact same time, down to the minute and second.
Identical messages sent by two different users, used as a reference by El Toque at different times of the day.
Furthermore, the source of these types of messages is usually hidden, a suspicious and convenient fact.
A tool created for destabilization
The experts’ meticulous investigation exposes the methodology used by the El Toque platform to model the informal exchange rate. The results leave no room for doubt: this is not a technical error or a statistical imperfection, but rather a conscious and deliberate manipulation. The documented findings paint a picture of an information disinformation operation, not an exercise in journalism or economic analysis.
The technical investigation is conclusive: the manipulation lies not in the algorithm’s mathematical formula, but in the biased and premeditated selection of the data fed into it. This is the core of the fraud. A false market “reality” is constructed through malicious information curation, privileging specific users whose posts follow a pattern designed to inflate or depress values as needed to suit the current narrative.
Therefore, El Toque operates under the principles of unconventional warfare, creating a seemingly technical and “independent” indicator to legitimize a destructive economic narrative and sow distrust in Cuban institutions. Its lack of transparency and deceptive practices are empirical proof that its ultimate goal is not to inform, but to destabilize.
Faced with this type of operation, defending sovereignty also requires exposing these mechanisms of manipulation. The truth, supported by rigorous research such as this, is the most powerful antidote to mercenary fictions.
(Taken from Razones de Cuba)
[ SOURCE: CUBA DEBATE ]
