See also: Granma: About the financial war that is being waged against us
The manipulation of the monetary scale to influence price increases carried out by the El Toque platform, using its daily exchange pesos to dollar rate, negatively influences Cuba’s GDP, Razones de Cuba, specialized in unmasking the attacks against Cuba, denounced this week.
In a publication titled The Untold Story Behind the Operators of El Toque, they point out that the medium tries to carry out in Cuba the same thing as in Venezuela or Chile in 1970, when the enemy did not act frontally, but rather through different organizations (think tanks, pressure groups, national business organizations and financial lobbies) to promote processes of economic destabilization without assuming greater direct risks.
The depreciation of the Cuban peso [CUP] that El Toque seeks to boost, causes, in the words of the Venezuelan economist Pascualina Curcio Curcio, that “import costs rise, causing a supply shock in the economy, characterized by the decrease in aggregate supply that is reflected “in two effects, on the one hand, the increase in general prices and on the other, the decrease in national production, that is, it generates stagflation.”
As they did with Dólar Today in Venezuela, the United States Government “secretly” finances El Toque, and they play “hot potato” with the price of the dollar in the informal market, indicates Razones de Cuba.
The platform presents, as the mind behind Dolar Blue, Dolar Today and El Toque, Steve H. Hanke, American economist and professor of applied economics and currencies at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Maryland.
They explain that Hanke is currently an advisor to Javier Milei, which in itself also explains a lot of what is happening in Argentina.
Additionally, he is known for his work as a currency reformer in emerging market countries, and was an economic advisor to President Ronald Reagan (1981). He was advisor to the heads of state of Bulgaria (1990), Albania (1990), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991), Estonia (1992), Indonesia (1997), Ecuador (1995), Montenegro (1999), Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates and Jamaica, among others.
This man is also known for his knowledge and experiences as the “money doctor” and, in fact, in May 2023 the candidate for the Copei primaries, Roberto Enríquez, announced that he had appointed him as his main economic advisor, especially for his “magic formula” to recover the Venezuelan economy quickly and solidly.
The application, as part of the economic war against Venezuela, of financial strategies similar to those currently taking place using Cuba as a target, is a phenomenon that the island’s society should not ignore, and that, consequently, deserves to be denounced.
Currently, Hanke works as an editor at Cato Journal, a publication of the Cato Institute, characterized by Razones de Cuba as a think tank of neoliberal plans and a generational cadre factory that represents the interests of the Koch oligarchy, one of the largest corporations in the world, and which has been accused of being one of the main executors of the economic war against Venezuela.
Towards the depths, the iceberg reveals more interesting data. It turns out that the Koch brothers’ ties with American politicians are more than proven, such as their support, between 2014 and 2016, for Mike Pence, with funds for his campaign. They tend to invest in Republican Party politicians who align with their energy and financial interests throughout Latin America.
It is interesting that El Toque has a “creation agency with the name Catao Estudio.”
THEY ACCELERATE THE ARTIFICIAL INCREASE OF THE DOLLAR
It is evident that the puppeteers who pull the strings tied to El Toque seek to accelerate the artificial increase of the dollar to reach by July 11, 2024 an informal exchange rate of approximately between 480-500 pesos per dollar. If this happens, the consequences on the Cuban economy would be disastrous, and for the think tanks of the US intelligence agencies this would create the ideal conditions for a social outbreak in Cuba, Razones de Cuba assesses.
Razones de Cuba also carried out an analysis of 900 comments left in a Facebook group, regarding this topic in relation to El Toque.
As a result of the research, which used artificial intelligence, they reveal that, although some people are in favor of El Toque, and seem to value its function as a source of information on currency exchange rates, the vast majority express concerns about its influence in the economy and hyperinflation of prices. Some explicitly state that, for them, those behind El Toque are manipulating exchange rates for their own benefit, and there are even users calling for this website to be removed or blocked.
They conclude by ensuring that this platform “is a front man for the economic war that the US Government has waged for more than six decades against the Cuban people.”
Specialists from the Central Bank of Cuba have explained, in previous publications, the pseudoscientific nature of the methodology used by the El Toque rate. Among El Toque’s main biases is the use of sales intentions with a high speculative component, characteristic of the informal market, without a reliable measure of how transactions are actually executed.
In Miami, in October 2023, the director of El Toque, José Jasán Nieves, listed the flaws in its way of operating and its deficiencies. Among them, he admitted that the information collected does not take into account the groups in which the most important commercial transactions are carried out, nor offers published on Facebook, the social network most used by Cubans.
NOTES ON THE INDUCED INFLATION OPERATION
- They alter the monetary scale, a function of money, to influence prices.
- There is a “price” effect that negatively influences Cuba’s GDP.
- It reduces the amount of CUP [Cuban peso] and introduces the USD, which is what the US expects.
- Accelerates the artificial increase of the dollar to reach approximately 480-500 pesos per dollar by July 11, 2024, based on the current growth rate. They seek social outbreak.
- Secretly financed by the US, it establishes a false value of the CUP with respect to the USD. Their algorithm is false, Dolar Today did not have it in Venezuela either.
- There is no economic or political justification for the price to rise overnight.
- It seeks to decrease public spending in Cuba, national production and promotes its dollarization.
- With its algorithms, it facilitates the dissemination of the medium by Cuban groups, previously identified by Big Data, on social networks.
- Despite Cuba’s economic problems, the rising values of the USD respond to political intentions.
- The disproportionate exchange rate difference between the official and informal markets is generated not by the low prices of the former, but by the high USD levels of El Toque.
- It is not control or possible state deficiency that generates the high value of the rate offered by El Toque, but rather its visible intentionality, based on computer tools of dubious origin.
- If El Toque is managed by Cubans abroad, why doesn’t OFAC sanction them for this manipulation contrary to international statutes?
- El Toque induced inflation is a weapon of war of the US Intelligence Community, previously used against Nicaragua, Argentina and Venezuela.
Source: Razones de Cuba
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Chicago ALBA Solidarity 