Leftist President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum confirmed on Tuesday that her country halted an oil shipment to Cuba’s communist Castro regime slated for the end of this month — but claimed that it was a “sovereign decision” and not as a result of “pressure” from the United States.
Sheinbaum then “clarified” on Wednesday morning that Mexico supplies oil to Cuba as both contractual transactions and “humanitarian aid” but abstained from confirming to reporters if shipments would resume through either method.
Mexico, through state-owned oil company Pemex, has supplied the Castro regime with regular oil shipments since 2023 during the administration of former leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Pemex reportedly shipped an average of one ship per month to Cuba in 2025, at an average rate of 20,000 barrels per day.
The oil is mainly used by the rogue communists to keep Cuba’s barely functional power grid working after more than six decades’ worth of disastrous communist policies left all of the nation’s infrastructure on the brink of complete ruin.
By January, Mexico had reportedly become Cuba’s top oil supplier as a direct result of President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign on Venezuela’s socialist regime – which, under the auspices of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, supplied the Castro regime with oil for over two decades. In December, President Trump ordered a still-active blockade on all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela. Over the past days, President Trump has explicitly stated that U.S. foreign policy would also soon target Cuba, a longtime U.S.-designated State Sponsor of Terrorism.
“THERE WILL BE NO MORE OIL OR MONEY GOING TO CUBA — ZERO! I strongly suggest they make a deal, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,” Trump wrote in a message on the website Truth Social on January 11.
Bloomberg reported on Monday that Pemex “backtracked” on sending a new oil shipment to Cuba scheduled for arrival before the end of this month. Documents reviewed by Bloomberg reportedly indicated that the cargo was removed from shipping schedules. The outlet noted that, although the cause for the suspension was unclear, it occurred amid President Trump’s increased pressure on the Cuban regime.
On Tuesday, speaking to reporters, President Sheinbaum ambiguously confirmed that Pemex had halted the scheduled oil shipment reported by Bloomberg and stated that it was a “sovereign decision” and not one caused by “external pressure.”
“Pemex makes decisions regarding its contractual relationship with Cuba for example, for a period of time, shipments were not sent, and then they were sent, and then they were not sent again,” the Mexican president said. “The decision of when to send it and how to send it is a sovereign decision and is in accordance with what Pemex defines in terms of contracts or, in any case, the government.”
In her Wednesday morning press conference, Sheinbaum referred to reports from local outlets indicating the “suspension” of Mexican oil shipments to Cuba and “clarified” that Mexico supplies oil to Cuba through two separate methods: through commercial contracts between Pemex and Cuban state institutions and through “humanitarian help.” Sheinbaum claimed that she “never said whether it had been suspended or not, that was a subsequent interpretation based on a newspaper article.”
“So, humanitarian aid to Cuba, as to other countries, continues, because it is humanitarian aid, and Mexico has always been in solidarity with the whole world, and these are sovereign decisions,” Sheinbaum, said.
“The issue of the contract, well, obviously the contract is with Pemex, so the contract determines when it is sent, when it is not sent, in short, everything that has to do with that,” she continued.
Asked by a journalist if the “humanitarian aid” shipments of Mexican oil to Cuba would continue, Sheinbaum responded, “Well, there, let’s say, we have to determine that based on the requests.”
The independent outlet 14 y Medio reported last week that the Cuban regime is seeking oil from Africa to offset the loss of access to Venezuelan oil. 14 y Medio, citing Jorge Piñón, an energy expert at the University of Texas, reported that a Marshall Islands-flagged oil tanker departed from Lomé, Togo, on Monday and is expected to arrive in Havana on February 4. The expert noted that the quality of the cargo cannot be known with certainly but asserted that based on the ship’s capacity and the draft observed by monitoring services, “it seems that it is not fully loaded” and could be carrying either 314,500 barrels of diesel or 280,500 barrels of fuel oil.
Piñón explained to the outlet that that the oil could have been a “cash purchase” by Cubametales, a U.S.-sanctioned Cuban state-owned company that handles oil imports and exports, through a “European intermediary.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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