Depends on oil Because almost everything. Without vital imports of at least 4 million barrels a year, the lights will literally go out on the island. “Apagones”, power cuts, have been part of everyday life on the island for two or three years.
“Even the capital Havana is increasingly plunged into darkness for eight, ten, twelve hours every day,” says Omar Everleny Pérez. The economist and analyst lives in Marianao, a middle-class district in western Havana, and had hoped on Sunday that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum would withstand pressure from the USA. “Mexico has a long history of solidarity with the Cuban revolution and has increased oil exports to Cuba in recent years – among other things in exchange for the deployment of a few thousand doctors between Chihuahua and Chiapas,” said Pérez.
But 48 hours later, Sheinbaum announced that Mexico would stop supplying oil to Cuba. This is a sovereign decision by the Mexican oil company Pemex. The Mexican government’s decision whether or not to deliver oil to Cuba for humanitarian reasons was sovereign and not made under pressure from the USA. “Mexico has always been in solidarity and will continue to be so,” said the President. However, she did not want to explain at the press conference on Tuesday whether and when the country would deliver oil to Cuba again.
Between war economy and economic collapse
This is devastating news for Havana. Cuba has been cut off from crude oil deliveries from Venezuela since the US army kidnapped Nicolás Maduro and the parallel seizure of oil tankers in the region. In January, Mexico became the most important supplier to the island economy, which is suffering from a deep economic crisis. The last tanker, the “Ocean” Mariner, has, according to the Mexican daily newspaper The Financier entered Havana Bay on January 11 with 86,000 barrels of light crude oil.
For Cuba, this is a delivery that covers the island’s emergency needs for a few days. This is around 6 to 7 million barrels per year. Almost 3 million barrels come from Cuba’s own production, which can only be processed with great effort in the island’s outdated and dilapidated power plants, which repeatedly leads to power plant accidents.
The Mexican government also knows this, and has been supplying good quality oil to Cuba since 2023, which at least partially offsets the deployment of Cuban personnel in Mexico. “How they will be paid in the future is an open question,” says Pérez. Not only in the case of Mexico, where around 4,000 Cubans are deployed, but also in the case of Venezuela, where, according to Pérez, there are likely to be more than 15,000. Their remuneration is essential for Havana, because the tourism sector is shrinking from year to year and the domestic economy is unfortunately suffering from a lack of electricity and fuel.
In 2025, the island’s economy shrank by another 1.5 percent, according to data from the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Cepal). For US President Donald Trump it is clear that Cuba must fall like a ripe apple into the US lap, just as US President James Monroe predicted in the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.
Trump’s Secretary of State as President of Cuba?
The USA is putting maximum pressure on the Venezuelan president Delcy Rodriguezwhich is not allowed to deliver oil or other aid to Havana. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio openly threatened Rodríguez with violence “to ensure maximum cooperation when other methods fail.” Rubio is already being traded as the future president of Cuba on “Truth Social”, the ultra-conservative internet platform used by Donald Trump. Rubio likes to call the Cuban revolution an “accident of history.”
Cuba’s top leadership reacted to pressure from the USA last weekend and declared “estado de guerra”, a state of war. The island should now run on a low budget. But President Miguel Díaz-Canel and old revolutionary Raúl Castro have not said how this will work in detail and without sufficient oil. The Cuban exile community in the USA is already speculating that the revolutionary island is on the verge of collapse.