Miguel Díaz-Canel admitted this Saturday that the Russian oil received at the end of March will run out in the coming days and that the Cuban government does not know when a new shipment of fuel will arrive on the island.
“That oil is running out these days, and we don’t know when more fuel will arrive in Cuba,” stated the leader in a speech before delegates of international solidarity gathered in Havana on May 2, a day after the May Day march.
In his speech, Díaz-Canel acknowledged that Cuba went four consecutive months without receiving fuel from abroad. He explained that the interruption began in December 2025, when Venezuela stopped sending oil due to the naval blockade imposed on that country, and it worsened with the Executive Order 14380 that Donald Trump signed on January 29, 2026, which imposed secondary sanctions on any nation or company that exported fuel to Cuba.
"We went four months without receiving fuel until a fuel ship from Russia arrived, which allowed us in the last 15 days to change the energy situation in the country," stated the leader.
The only relief arrived on March 31 with the Russian tanker Anatoli Kolodkin, which docked in Matanzas with approximately 730,000 barrels of crude oil donated by Moscow. Díaz-Canel himself had characterized that shipment as "symbolic" weeks earlier, noting that it represented only a third of what Cuba needs in a month, enough for about ten days.
The Minister of Energy and Mines, Vicente de la O Levy, had warned on April 22 that Russian fuel would last only until the end of that month, and the blackouts confirmed that projection: on April 30, the outages once again exceeded 1,500 MW, pushing the island back to the brink of an electrical collapse.
The situation is further complicated because Cuba needs eight fuel ships each month to meet its energy demands—between 90,000 and 110,000 barrels per day—a figure that has not been reached in this period. Domestic production barely reaches around 40,000 barrels per day.
A second Russian ship, the Universal, carrying about 200,000 barrels of diesel, diverted its course towards Trinidad and Tobago last Monday and is sailing at a slow speed on an erratic course in the Atlantic, with no confirmation of its final destination.
The shift from the Universal is partly due to the pressure from the United States General License 134B, which only permits transactions of Russian oil loaded until May 16, 2026, further tightening the window for any new shipments.
The situation escalated on May 1, when Trump signed a new executive order imposing expanded sectoral sanctions in energy, defense, mining, and financial services, with immediate enforcement and no grace period, while threatening third-country banks that do business with Cuba.
"How can a country's economy be sustained? How can the services of a country be maintained when it is denied the receipt of fuel?" asked Díaz-Canel before international delegates, marking one of the starkest admissions regarding the depth of the energy crisis facing the Cuban people.
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