The Ministry of Finance and Prices of Cuba announced this Tuesday that starting Friday, May 15, at 12:00 AM, the sales prices in foreign currency for fuels will no longer be fixed and uniform across the country, marking a structural change in the regime's energy policy.
According to the official statement, "the sales prices in foreign currency for fuels will be updated, either upward or downward, in accordance with the actual costs of each specific operation."
In practice, this means that different retail prices will coexist at the service stations across the country, determined by each economic actor authorized to import fuel in foreign currency.
The factors that will determine the price in each case will be the supplier, the cost of freight, the supply route, insurance, risks, and fluctuations in the international market.
The ministry itself acknowledges that maintaining a single price "cannot be economically sustained under the current conditions," which amounts to admitting that the State can no longer guarantee supply at regulated prices and shifts the real cost of scarcity directly to the consumer who pays in dollars.
The regime attributes the measure to the sanctions from the Trump administration, particularly the executive orders of January 29 and May 1, 2026, which imposed secondary tariffs on any country or company that sold oil to Cuba.
However, the fuel crisis is the result of a buildup of structural factors that go far beyond the U.S. embargo.
The capture of Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, cut between 25,000 and 35,000 daily barrels that Venezuela supplied to the island, and Mexico suspended shipments from Pemex on January 9 of that same year under pressure from Washington, when the Mexican company covered 44% of Cuba's fuel imports.
Domestic production covers only 40,000 of the 110,000 barrels per day that Cuba requires, according to expert Jorge Piñón from the University of Texas.
The result was that Cuba, which needs eight fuel ships per month, only received one between December 2025 and the end of April 2026, while Miguel Díaz-Canel himself acknowledged in April that Cuba "absolutely lacks fuel for almost everything."
In the informal market, the price of a liter of gasoline reached between 4,000 and 6,000 Cuban pesos in April 2026, equivalent to between seven and eleven dollars at the informal exchange rate.
The price liberalization announced today is the next phase of a process that began in January 2024, when nearly 30 gas stations started selling fuel exclusively in dollars, and accelerated in February 2026, when CIMEX suspended sales in Cuban pesos and limited gasoline in dollars to 20 liters per person through a digital appointment platform.
More than 1,700 international flights have been canceled since February 2026 as a direct consequence of the supply crisis, a number that illustrates the extent of the energy collapse facing the island.
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