Russia is preparing a second shipment of oil to Cuba after the successful arrival of the first shipment, which broke, with US permission, a three-month energy blockade on the island, according to Russian Energy Minister Sergey Tsivilyov this Thursday (2).
“One Russian ship broke the blockade. Now the second is being loaded. We will not abandon the Cubans,” Tsivilyov told local media at an energy forum held in the city of Kazan. The minister noted that the decision was taken after a meeting held in St. Petersburg with Cuban representatives.
The oil tanker Anatoli Kolodkin, sanctioned by the US and the European Union and loaded with 100,000 tons of crude oil, arrived in Cuba this week in what was the first shipment to dock on the island in the last three months, following the blockade imposed by the US following the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in January.
“This valuable aid arrives in the midst of the energy siege imposed by the USA, which is trying to suffocate the Cuban population,” said the Havana Foreign Ministry on the social network X.
President Donald Trump minimized the fact that Moscow had broken the blockade imposed by Washington and ruled out that the arrival of oil in Cuba would have any impact on the island’s current situation.
“It doesn’t bother me (…) they have a bad regime, bad and corrupt leadership, and whether or not an oil ship arrives doesn’t matter,” said the American official.
The inability of the Cuban authorities to meet energy demand has brought oil shortages to a critical point, which has intensified prolonged daily blackouts and caused an almost total paralysis of the economy, in addition to impacting basic health, transport and other services.
Cuba needs around 100,000 barrels a day to satisfy its energy needs, of which around 40,000 come from its national production. The impossibility of covering the remaining demand resulted in daily power outages and an almost complete shutdown of the economy.
