elTOQUE

How elTOQUE Defends Independent Journalism in Cuba and Around the World

elTOQUE is an independent multimedia platform that chronicles the story of Cuba and provides high-quality journalism to audiences on the island and across the diaspora. Operating as a distributed, cross-border team since 2014, the organization publishes civic tools, such as the "Representative Rate of the Informal Market,” which tracks exchange rates between the Cuban peso and major foreign currencies. Providing such independent information has made elTOQUE a constant target for sophisticated cyberattacks and censorship.

For elTOQUE, the Internet is not just a distribution channel; it is the lifeline connecting their reporting to the Cuban diaspora and those on the island.

"Our web presence is mission-critical... When our site is slow, blocked, or offline, people lose timely access to information they rely on to make everyday decisions and to stay informed." - Abraham Calas Torres, Director of Innovation & Technology

In December 2025, the organization faced a coordinated effort to silence its site. A sustained Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack flooded its servers with a total of 426.8 million malicious requests. The traffic volume overwhelmed available resources—leading to memory pressure on elTOQUE’s servers and taking services offline for hours. Once the site was protected with Cloudflare services toward the end of the DDoS attack, “the malicious traffic was effectively mitigated," Abraham Calas Torres said. Also in December, elTOQUE reported that its website was blocked for people in Cuba.

Cloudflare Products

Project Galileo helps ensure elTOQUE can stay online and focus on its mission: providing journalism and public-service tools to audiences inside and outside Cuba.

"Cloudflare has effectively become our first line of defense—reducing exposure of our origin infrastructure, absorbing abusive traffic, and helping keep the site reachable even when we face disruption attempts." - Abraham Calas Torres

elTOQUE utilizes a suite of Cloudflare tools to maintain an open, secure, and fast Internet experience for its users:

• DDoS Protection: Automatically detects and mitigates large-scale volumetric attacks, ensuring the site remains online even when targeted by attacks.
• Web Application Firewall (WAF): Employs managed rules to block common and emerging web threats, protecting the site's origin infrastructure from exploitation.
• Content Delivery Network: Stores content at the network edge, significantly improving load times for users on constrained or unstable networks inside Cuba.
• SSL/TLS Encryption: Ensures all data transferred between a user's browser and the organization's server is encrypted, protecting user privacy and safeguarding sensitive information from interception.