A Cuban journalist in exile, José J. Nieves is the editor-in-chief of elTOQUE, an independent media outlet that has become an essential source of information in one of the world’s most repressive media environments. Nieves, who is the winner of the 2026 ICFJ Knight International Journalism Award, delivered the following remarks on Nov. 10 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, at the ICFJ Awards Dinner 2026.
 

Good evening. Thank you to ICFJ and the Knight Foundation for this honor. And thank you to my colleagues at elTOQUE who made possible every result being recognized tonight.

This award carries my name, but it was earned by my team. Thank you. For more than six decades, the Cuban regime held a monopoly over the story of Cuba. It decided what Cubans could know, what the world could hear, and what could not be said at all. That monopoly is broken.

Independent Cuban journalism, much of it made from exile, has taken from the Castro regime's propaganda and from its allies abroad, the power to define reality. And in doing so, it has helped create something the regime fears even more than criticism— new consensus, and new actors of change in Cuban civil society.

I have no doubt where this ends. One of the longest dictatorships in the world will see the dawn of definitive historic change.

But tonight, I want to speak about exile journalism itself. Ours is a profession already facing enough crisis. Exile adds another layer. No ground under your feet, no access to the places you cover, and a country that expelled you but never stopped being yours. So when people call us resilient and innovative, I hear a double recognition.

In exile, everything costs twice as much.

Across the journalism industry, advertising models are in crisis and problematic revenue is declining. For the media in exile, even that shrinking source of income can be out of reach.Businesses fear reprisals if they advertise with us, and sanctions together with platform rules can prevent outlets from earning revenue from audiences in the countries we cover.

I believe the future of independent media in exile depends on our ability to build solutions that allow our diasporas to support journalism that continues to serve the country we left behind. Next week, we are launching elTOQUE USA, a Spanish language news initiative serving communities in South Florida for Cubans in America.

elTOQUE USA will offer, from next week, for Cuban-Americans a new kind of remittance back home. Every subscription they purchase helps us continue reporting on Cuba.

At elTOQUE, we reinvent every day what it means to practice journalism that has a real, tangible impact on the country we were forced to leave. elTOQUE is an experiment in social innovation. It is a bridge for a transnational nation connecting Cubans on the island and everywhere else.

And our products have become civic data infrastructure. The exchange that great millions of Cubans rely on every day and the legal information that helps people defend their rights.

None of this is free. We carry the psychological cost of loss and risk. Transnational repression follows us and sometimes it reaches us. And daring to confront authoritarian power is paid for with freedom and sometimes, with life.

And yet here we are. We keep going with a strange mix of stubbornness, passion, and realism—not always in the right proportions.

You have to be very stubborn and very passionate to keep doing what we do. But it all makes sense the moment one of our stories changes someone's life.

I dedicate this award to my wife, my moral Everest, to my two children who feel deeply Cuban, though they have no memory of the island we lost.

And to Cuban journalists, including those harassed and imprisoned like my colleagues Joanni Sanchez and Henry Constantine.

Thank you.