For Journalists in Exile, Staying Online Is Part of the Fight

José J. Nieves, a journalist and former ICFJ Knight Fellow, left his native Cuba in 2019 as it was growing increasingly hostile to journalists. But the threats followed him. The Cuban government's campaign against Nieves continues to impact him, his family and El Toque, the independent media platform he leads. El Toque's staff in Cuba has been interrogated and threatened, Nieves' family house in the U.S. has been surveilled and El Toque's website is regularly targeted.

On December 17, 2025, the media outlet, which provides journalism and public-service tools to audiences inside and outside Cuba, faced a coordinated effort to silence it. A sustained attack flooded its servers with over 400 million malicious requests, taking it offline for multiple hours.

The next day, an even bigger attack hit. But this time, El Toque barely felt it. Following the first attack, Nieves and his team had deployed protection through Cloudflare's anti-bot protection service. The attack was mitigated, and El Toque stayed online.

El Toque is one of over twenty news organizations receiving a suite of digital protections through the Plus Hub, a shared services initiative run by ICFJ+ (Plus). The resources are made available through a partnership between the Plus Hub and Cloudflare's Project Galileo, a program that provides free cybersecurity protection to at-risk public interest organizations.

The Plus Hub gives participating outlets access to Cloudflare services that would otherwise be out of reach for most of them. The protections include a tool that automatically detects and mitigates attacks, a content delivery network that improves loading times and encryption that protects reader privacy.

Interested in receiving digital protections?

"Operationally, we can now respond to incidents faster and with more confidence: instead of scrambling to protect infrastructure under pressure, we apply controls proactively and restore normal service more quickly," said Nieves. "The result is less downtime and lower strain on a small team."

Those services are particularly vital for exiled media outlets like El Toque. Today, 74% of the world's population lives in autocratic countries. Journalists working in those environments are being targeted and silenced. Many of them flee. Once in exile, they face a new set of challenges to sustain their careers, their communities and their reporting from afar - while combating threats that can follow them abroad.

The digital risks facing independent publishers like Nieves aren't just politically motivated. Bot traffic from AI scrapers harvesting original reporting without permission drives up hosting costs and can strain newsrooms' financial resources. The Plus Hub and Cloudflare also provide outlets with the resources to block AI traffic and reclaim the value of their original work.

Exiled media outlets depend on their websites to reach the audiences they can no longer physically access in their home country. But most small and mid-sized newsrooms cannot afford robust protection on their own. By bringing together a network of outlets through the Plus Hub, Plus is able to offer these services collectively, putting enterprise-grade security within reach of independent media.

For journalists like Nieves, who have already gone through many challenges to keep informing their audiences, digital security is an essential part of keeping their journalism alive.

If your media organization is interested in receiving digital protections through the Plus Hub and Cloudflare's Project Galileo, please fill out this interest form.