This is what is known.
MIAMI, United States. – The Venezuelan oil tanker Skipper, seized this Wednesday by United States forces off the coast of Venezuela, was heading to Cuba, where the state company Cubametales expected to receive a substantial part of the crude oil shipment to resell it to Asian intermediaries, according to documents from the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, maritime monitoring data and officials cited by media such as AP, Reuters and POLITICAL.
The operation, published in a video posted on X by the United States Attorney General, Pam Bondishowed members of the Coast Guard and other agencies descending from helicopters onto the ship’s deck. Bondi stated that federal agencies “executed a seizure order” against a tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran and recalled that the ship has been sanctioned for years for being part of “an illicit oil transportation network that supports foreign terrorist organizations,” in reference to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) and Hezbollah.
According to the AP agency, the Skipper was transporting about two million barrels of Venezuelan heavy crude oil and “approximately half of the cargo” was destined for “a Cuban state oil importer.” That same proportion — about 50% of the cargo — appears in PDVSA documents consulted by Reuters and other media, which describe a Cuban state buyer as one of the owners of the oil on board.
Cubametales in the center of the route
The key point to understand the Skipper’s journey is the identity of that Cuban importer. POLITICALciting a person familiar with the operation, reported that the ship “was heading to Cuba, where the state-owned company Cubametales planned to sell the cargo to Asian energy intermediaries.”
Cubametales is the Cuban state company in charge of the import and export of oil. The US Department of the Treasury He sanctioned her in 2019when he pointed out it as “the Cuban state oil importing and exporting company” and accused it of continuing to receive Venezuelan crude oil despite the sanctions against PDVSA. Since then, Washington considers it a central cog in the scheme that allows Havana to obtain oil in exchange for political, security and intelligence support for the Nicolás Maduro regime.
In this case, the scheme was similar but with an additional twist: once unloaded in Cuba, Cubametales would have resold at least part of the Venezuelan crude oil to “Asian energy brokers,” that is, intermediaries who would place that oil in Asian markets, probably disguising the origin of the shipment to circumvent sanctions.
None of the parties involved—neither Cubametales nor the Cuban authorities—has publicly commented on this version so far.
What the route shows: from Venezuela to Cuba and beyond
Maritime tracking data allows part of the journey to be reconstructed. The Skipper set sail in early December from the port of José, Venezuela’s main crude export terminal, loaded with heavy crude oil. According to the firm TankerTrackers.comthe ship used typical “dark fleet” techniques, such as falsifying its position signals and carrying out ship-to-ship transfers to conceal the origin of the oil.
The same database indicates that before the seizure, the Skipper transferred nearly 200,000 barrels of its cargo to another tanker, the Neptune 6, near Curacao, and that this second ship was headed to Cuba.
The Skipper is part of a group of sanctioned tankers that have been used to transport Iranian and Venezuelan crude oil through opaque operations, according to Reuters.
Skipper’s link with financing networks of organizations designated as terrorist by Washington goes back a long way. In 2022, the Treasury Department sanctioned the then Adisa —the ship’s previous name—and its owner Triton Navigation Corp. as part of “a vast and complex network of front companies” used to blend Iranian oil and export it in support of Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force.
This same network of “obscured” ships has been key for Venezuela, under sanctions, to continue placing its crude oil in Asian markets with the help of intermediaries, relabeling the cargo or transshipping it on the high seas. China has become the main final destination of this oil, while Cuba systematically appears as one of the intermediate recipients through Cubametales.
Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, coordinator of the Cuba Decide platform, summarized this connection in a message in X. The opposition leader, also a commissioner of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), assured that the Skipper was sanctioned years ago “for helping an illicit network linked to foreign terrorist groups” and that “Cubametales planned to move the cargo to Asian corridors.” In Payá’s opinion, “the route says a lot about who really runs Maduro’s lifeguards.”
In response to Payá, Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar supported andThis seizure and stated: “Cuba is the nerve center of Maduro’s criminal lifeline, moving sanctioned oil, financing terrorist networks and destabilizing our region.” I applaud President Trump for taking decisive action. Going after the oil tankers, smugglers and dictators who poison our region is the way to restore security and freedom in the hemisphere.
So where was the ship going?
Based on the information available in primary sources and media that cite official documents, the underlying question can be answered quite precisely:
- Immediate destination of the route: The Skipper left Venezuela with heavy crude oil and had Cuba as its operational stopover, where at least half of the cargo corresponded to a Cuban state importer and another part was already being transferred to a second ship heading to the Island.
- Final commercial destination of part of the crude oil: According to the source cited by POLITICAL and confirmed in other analyses, Cubametales planned to resell that oil to Asian intermediaries, inserting it into the opaque trade network that feeds both the finances of the Maduro regime and those of its sanctioned allies.
In summary, the oil tanker seized by the United States was not going alone “from Venezuela to some uncertain place,” as the American president himself suggested, but rather it followed an already known route: Venezuela–Cuba–Asia, with Cubametales as the central link. What the seizure has done is expose, in an unusually visible way, that circuit where Venezuelan oil, the Cuban state apparatus and a “dark fleet” come together at the service of networks sanctioned for financing organizations considered terrorist by Washington.
