MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Mexico shipping oil to energy starved Cuba

The cargoes were tracked through maritime monitoring platforms, showing consistent routes between Mexico and Cuba.

So far this year, Mexico has shipped more than US$ 3 billion worth of subsidized fuel to Cuba through Gasolinas Bienestar, a subsidiary of Pemex, according to an investigation by Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad (MCCI), as reported by OilPrice.

MCCI found that at least 58 fuel shipments — including gasoline, diesel, and crude — departed from Mexican ports over just four months, (May to August), mostly from Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, with three leaving from Tampico, Tamaulipas.

The cargoes were tracked through maritime monitoring platforms, showing consistent routes between Mexico and Cuba.

MCCI also points out that one of the vessels, the Sandino, was included in the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions list in 2019 for transporting Venezuelan oil to Cuba. Despite this, the Sandino departed from Laguna de Pajaritos on August 20 and arrived a week later at Cuba’s Camilo Cienfuegos refinery, the investigation revealed.

The Cuban importer was Coreydan S.A., a state-owned company based in Havana that shares offices with CUPET, Cuba’s national oil firm.

According to MCCI, the scale of Mexico’s fuel aid to Cuba matches the 2026 federal budget for the country’s Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection and far exceeds the budgets for the Attorney General’s Office and education infrastructure funds combined.

MCCI previously warned that the subsidized shipments have worsened Pemex’s financial health. In its first year, Gasolinas Bienestar reported losses and debt of more than US$ 300 million, reflecting the cost of supplying Cuba with free fuel.

However in contrast to what MCCI reports, in the Miami Herald, energy expert Jorge Piñón questioned the accuracy of the reported US$ 3 billion fuel shipments, noting Cuba lacks the storage capacity for such volumes and that customs data is often unreliable. If true, he said, the surge raises key questions amid Cuba’s energy crisis: “Where is that oil? Is Cuba exporting it?”

If so it would not come as a surprise since it is well documented that when Cuba was short of hard currency, it would sell cheap Soviet oil provided by Moscow and similarly with shipments supplied by Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez

For Mexican diplomacy it also means the recovery of influence over Central America and the Caribbean, ftom where it was displaced by the ‘generosity’ of the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.