Mexico’s decision to suspend oil shipments to Cuba while expanding humanitarian aid has exposed the limits of its room for manoeuvre under renewed US pressure, as well as the depth of Cuba’s escalating energy and economic crisis.
The move reflects a careful recalibration by President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government, which is attempting to shield Mexico from punitive tariffs threatened by Washington while avoiding a complete rupture with Havana.
At the centre of the dispute is a January executive order signed by US President Donald Trump declaring a national emergency with respect to Cuba and authorising sanctions and secondary tariffs on any country supplying oil to the island.
This followed the US military intervention in Venezuela, long Cuba’s main energy provider, and the subsequent collapse of already dwindling fuel flows from Caracas in the wake of the ouster of Nicolas Maduro. According to Bloomberg, Mexico had effectively become Cuba’s principal oil supplier in recent months, covering close to 80% of its imported crude needs together with Venezuela last year, based on data from Kpler.
Sheinbaum confirmed this week that all oil shipments are currently “detained”, explicitly citing the need to avoid economic retaliation against Mexico from its key trading partner, the US. While rejecting the legitimacy of the broadening US embargo, she acknowledged that continued exports could trigger tariffs affecting Mexican trade.
The suspension marks a sharp reversal from late 2024, when oil deliveries to Cuba increased significantly and were partly classified as humanitarian aid following Hurricane Rafael.
The scale of the commercial relationship underscores the sensitivity of the decision. Official data released by the Mexican government and cited by El País show that Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), through its subsidiary Gasolinas Bienestar, sold nearly $1.5bn worth of crude and petroleum products to Cuba between 2023 and 2025, at market prices and under contracts denominated in pesos.
In 2024 alone, average exports reached over 20,000 barrels per day, equivalent to 2.8% of Mexico’s total crude exports. Pemex executives stressed that the arrangement was commercial rather than concessional, and that Cuba had remained current on payments.
For Cuba, however, the halt has had immediate consequences. The communist-run island recorded its first month with zero oil imports in a decade in January, according to shipping data cited by Bloomberg.
Despite recent efforts to diversify its electricity matrix with Chinese-made solar plants, Cuba generates over 80% of its electricity from oil, with stuttering thermal power plants – many of Soviet design – relying heavily on both domestic crude and, predominantly, imported fuel.
As a result, oil shortages have rippled across the economy: aviation fuel supplies have been exhausted, forcing authorities to warn international airlines that they cannot refuel on the island, several major tourist resorts have shut down, and queues at petrol stations in Havana have stretched for hours.
Cuban officials have previously acknowledged that national gasoline demand stands at roughly 8,200 barrels per day, a level that Mexican shipments had only just managed to cover for about a month at a time.
The humanitarian impact has been even more severe. Hospitals have suspended surgeries, restricted patient transfers and run critically low on diesel, medicines and basic supplies. Public transport networks have effectively collapsed in several provinces, with long-distance bus and ferry services curtailed due to lack of fuel, as reported by Cuban state media. Food rationing has intensified, with staples reportedly sufficient for only a few weeks.
Against this backdrop, Mexico has opted to maintain and expand non-energy assistance. Two Mexican navy vessels—the Papaloapan and Isla Holbox—departed the port of Veracruz carrying 814 tonnes of food and hygiene supplies, including rice, beans, canned fish and powdered milk. Further consignments, amounting to more than 1,500 tonnes of additional supplies, remain pending
Sheinbaum has framed the aid as a humanitarian obligation detached from ideological alignment, arguing that sanctions “should not strangle people”. Diplomatically, Mexico has positioned itself as a potential intermediary.
The president has said her administration is pursuing channels with Washington to find a formula that would allow Cuba to receive fuel without triggering sanctions, while the Havana regime has moved from defiance to some degree of willingness to engage with the Trump administration, albeit without placing political reform on the table.
Sheinbaum's policy illustrates the tension facing middle powers under intensifying US sanctions regimes, as governments are forced towards balance economic self-interest, regional solidarity and humanitarian considerations.
The suspension of oil exports may protect Mexico from immediate retaliation, but it removes one of the last buffers cushioning Cuba from a rapidly deepening energy shock, leaving humanitarian aid as an imperfect substitute for the fuel that underpins the island’s basic services.
Declaring Cuba a national security threat, the US has escalated its crippling economic sanctions — an absurd inversion of reality aimed at justifying regime change.
On 29 January, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to US national security and authorising sweeping new sanctions against any country that sells or provides oil to the island. The move threatens to plunge Cuba into a deep humanitarian crisis and marks a grave escalation of almost seven decades of US economic warfare against the island.
Cubans are already enduring a profound energy crisis as a direct result of the US blockade and previous Trump-era sanctions, including the 243 additional measures introduced during his first administration and left largely intact by Biden. This latest escalation, designed to cut off fuel supplies entirely, will be catastrophic. It will cripple the electricity system and devastate every aspect of daily life.
Let us be clear about what this means: hospitals without power; incubators and life-support machines unable to function; emergency surgeries carried out without light. Schools and workplaces forced to close. Bakeries unable to operate. Fuel shortages preventing the transport of food and medical supplies. Food spoiling in fridges and freezers. Hunger, illness and suffering will spread. This is a deliberate attack on a civilian population, intended to inflict pain, deprivation and desperation. It is cruel, calculated — and it will cost lives.
The executive order, cynically titled ‘Addressing threats to the United States by the government of Cuba’, is a repugnant collection of lies and hypocrisy. It bears the fingerprints of the pro-blockade mob of extremist Cuban-American politicians — including Marco Rubio, Carlos Giménez and María Elvira Salazar — who have long sought to starve the Cuban people into submission.
Trump, Rubio and their allies are seeking to complete the work outlined in the infamous 1960 Mallory Memorandum: the blueprint for seven decades of US economic warfare against Cuba. As the then US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Lester Mallory, made clear, the objective was to deny Cuba ‘money and supplies’, to ‘decrease monetary and real wages’, and to bring about ‘hunger, desperation and overthrow of government’. Sixty-six years later, this same policy of collective punishment is being intensified in plain sight. The ultimate goal remains the installation of a US-puppet government in Havana — a prospect Rubio admitted they would ‘love to see’ in remarks to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 28 January.
In declaring a so-called national emergency, the US falsely accuses Cuba of supporting ‘hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors’, claiming that Cuba threatens US ‘safety, national security, and foreign policy’. Designating this as a ‘national emergency’ also gives Trump a free hand to act with minimal oversight or consultation with other US lawmakers.
This is a grotesque inversion of reality. Cuba has never threatened the United States. On the contrary, it is Cuba that has lived under threat for decades. In the centenary year of his birth, the words of Fidel Castro ring truer than ever in exposing the cynicism behind US accusations. Speaking to students at the University of Buenos Aires in 2003, he said: ‘Our country does not drop bombs on other peoples, nor does it send thousands of planes to bomb cities. Our country does not possess nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Our tens of thousands of scientists and doctors have been educated in the idea of saving lives.’
While the US exports bombs, troops and war across the globe, Cuba sends doctors. From performing four million sight-saving operations through Operation Miracle, to the life-saving work of the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade; from training thousands of doctors from the Global South at the Latin American School of Medicine, to hosting peace talks in Colombia, Cuba is internationally recognised as a force for peace and humanitarian solidarity. If Cuba threatens US power at all, it is only by example.
Trump’s executive order also represents a direct attack on the sovereignty of all nations. By threatening sanctions and tariffs against countries that trade with Cuba, the US is using coercion, blackmail and economic intimidation to force other states into compliance. This extraterritorial enforcement of the blockade — long embedded in legislation such as the Helms-Burton Act — is a flagrant violation of international law.
This is economic warfare. It is collective punishment, with devastating humanitarian consequences.
The British government and the international community must publicly and unequivocally condemn this measure; call for the executive order to be rescinded; restate their opposition to the US blockade and its extraterritorial enforcement; and defend the Cuban people’s right to develop in peace.
Nations must defy Washington’s diktats and provide Cuba with a lifeline. These sanctions threaten not only the Cuban people, but Cuba’s international medical and humanitarian programmes — placing millions of lives around the world at risk. The aim is clear: to extinguish a living example of solidarity in action, and to silence the idea that another world is possible.
More than 3,000 people — including over 100 MPs, trade union general secretaries and public figures — have already signed the Cuba Solidarity Campaign’s Call for Peace and Sovereignty. This growing movement reflects a refusal to accept the collective punishment of an entire nation. Help build the widest possible movement to defend Cuba. Please add your name here.
Contributors
Natasha Hickman is the communications manager at the Cuba Solidarity Campaign.
