The energy assistance provided by Mexico, justified by its president as humanitarian aid, has not contributed at all to improving the lives of the Cuban people.
HAVANA.- In the midst of escalating tensions between Washington and Havana, the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaumhas reiterated its intention to continue sending oil to the Cuban regimewhose survival depends, almost exclusively, on a new fuel supplier emerging on the horizon. After the capture of Nicolás Maduro, and despite the phone callThat, almost twenty days later, Díaz-Canel said with Delcy Rodríguez -president in charge of Venezuela-, relations with Chavismo are approaching a freezing point. Silently, Cuba is withdrawing its personnel from the South American country. The material collaboration essential to keep the Castro machine alive has given way to the discourse of historical friendship and fraternal ties, an abstract relationship that no longer translates into barrels of crude oil, as demonstrated by the thirteen or more daily hours of blackout that Havana is suffering.
The void left by PDVSA has been filled by Mexico from 2025. According to reports of the state company PEMEX, between January and September of last year the Aztec nation sent to Cuba an average of 17,200 barrels of crude oil per day plus two thousand barrels per day of refined petroleum products, for an approximate value of 400 million dollars. Considering the ruthless blackouts that punished the Cuban population, including partial and total outages of the national electricity system, it is unlikely that such resources have been allocated to alleviate the generation deficit on the island.
The energy assistance provided by Mexico, justified by its president as humanitarian aid, has not contributed at all to improving the lives of the Cuban people. The Mexican left insists on disguising as collaboration the support of a decadent, interventionist, repressive dictatorship and enemy of civil liberties, which, in a context particularly adverse to its survival, chooses to increase its list of political prisoners instead of offering a gesture of good will by decreeing an amnesty law that returns to their homes more than a thousand Cubans unjustly imprisoned for the protests of the July 11, 2021.
While Claudia Sheinbaum sends oil and its derivatives as “humanitarian aid”, the Cuban people live in darkness, cook with firewood, charcoal or sawdust, walk to and from their workplace so as not to be left without a salary that is barely enough for a carton of eggs, and have to manage on their own the transportation that will take them to the hospital in case of emergency, since there are no ambulances or fuel.
For foreign visitors, however, the picture looks different. According to Lessner Gómez Molina – marketing director of the Ministry of Tourism – fuel is guaranteed for airplanes, buses that are in charge of urban routes and other vehicles to transport travelers. This is how the spokespersons of a sector controlled by the dictatorship try to relaunch Cuba as a tourist destination, without investing a single penny of that income in fixing a street in the town, cleaning up a hospital in the town, or supplying the pharmacies in the town.
Tourism and, probably, resale, are the destinations of Mexican oil, like they used to be for Venezuelan crude. Claudia Sheinbaum is not moved by compassion or respect for human rights, but by ideology and the calculated hope that the Cuban regime will agree to reason and draw up a viable scheme of reforms that will push back the increasingly real threat of a US naval blockade. Mexican fuel will continue to arrive in Cuba as long as Donald Trump considers it part of his strategy, but there is a time limit, and when the last grain of sand falls, if the desired negotiations do not occur, Claudia Sheinbaum will have to choose between the dictates of her “good heart”, or the bad decision of interfering with Trump’s plan to get rid of a regime that has been destabilizing the region for decades, parasitizing prosperous nations until leaving them in a state similar to that of Cuba and causing mass exoduses whose fate end is the southern border of the United States.
The Cuban leadership, which continues to squander the budget in useless plenary sessions, hopes that Mexico will continue to help it weather the storm, in the name of the economic and ideological interests they have in common. Claudia Sheinbaum, as head of state, maintains her speech of cooperation, but trusts that Havana will act wisely, since the Mexican government would be evaluating the possibility of reduce or completely suspend crude oil traffic to the island to avoid confronting the White House, with which he has his own pending negotiations. The tic toc is not just for Raúl Castro, Miguel Díaz-Canel and their cast. It is also for her and her party, who have been giving oxygen to a regime determined to survive at the expense of others for too long, while blaming external factors for the irreversible crisis in which they have plunged Cuba.
