Mexico-Cuban relations amidst the humanitarian crisis in Cuba

Cuba is currently facing the most serious economic, political and humanitarian crisis of its history, only comparable in its scale to the so-called ‘Special Period’ of the 1990s that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Soviet union had acted as Cuba’s closest ideological and economic supporter after the rise of the Castro-led communist regime in the aftermath of the 1959 revolution and the economic and energetic embargo that the US has unilaterally imposed ever since.

The current economic crisis mirrors the Special Period of the 1990s in more than one key respect, as, much like 30 years ago, Cuba's situation can be at least in part attributed to its loss of key strategic partners. The hawkishness of the second administration of US president Donald Trump - whose first term had already marked a serious retrocession in the normalisation of US-Cuba relations - has isolated Cuba even more than before. The kidnapping of then-president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent rise to power of his former vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, earlier this year meant that the Cuban regime had not only lost its closest ideological ally, but also, most importantly, its main source of crude oil. Cuba heavily relies on energy imports for electricity production and thus for sustaining its already weak healthcare and food production sectors.

Cuba is therefore a victim of the embargo, its own decades of political and economical mismanagement and the current geopolitical situation, which prevents other allies of the Cuban regime, such as Russia or Iran, from becoming too involved. This leaves Cuba with a small number of relevant allies willing to support it not only in humanitarian terms , but also through explicit support for the regime led by Miguel Díaz Canel. The most notable of these, in many ways, is Mexico.

Mexico's relationship with Cuba is, unlike any other in the region, and it cannot be reduced to the simple calculus of ideological alignment that characterizes, say, the relationships Cuba has historically maintained with Russia or Venezuela. It is older, more layered, and considerably more paradoxical than that.

Although not as apparent as its ties with other countries in the region, Cuba and Mexico share a colonial inheritance that created a cultural and familial intimacy between the two nations, one that has endured for centuries. Cuba's independence struggle also places Mexico in an important historical role: José Martí, the forefather of Cuban independence, organized much of his revolutionary activity from Mexico, and it was from the Mexican port of Tuxpan that Fidel Castro and his 81 companions boarded the yacht Granma in November 1956, setting sail for the eastern shores of Cuba to launch the guerrilla campaign that would eventually bring down the Batista regime. Mexico thus plays a key part in the official historiography of the Cuban revolution.

When that revolution consolidated into a communist regime and the United States applied overwhelming pressure on its Latin American neighbours to sever ties with Havana, Mexico took what was, at the time, a remarkable and politically costly decision: it refused. Mexico was the only Latin American country not to cut relations with Cuba in the 1960s despite these external pressures. This was not, it should be noted an act of pure ideological solidarity. Mexico, under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party that governed the country for the better part of seven decades, was not, by any definition, a communist state. Its motivations were a mixture of nationalism, anti-interventionism, domestic political management, and a carefully cultivated image of independence from Washington. By maintaining the Cuban connection, Mexico could signal to its own left-wing constituencies that it was not simply a vassal of United States foreign policy, while simultaneously privately reassuring Washington, that it would not become a genuine security threat. Mexican president Díaz Ordaz secretly promised US president Lyndon B. Johnson that Mexico would be unequivocally by Washington's side when it truly mattered. The relationship was, in short, a masterclass in diplomatic ambiguity, and Cuba was its most enduring instrument.

This tradition of formal solidarity,  rhetorically robust but operationally flexible,  continued through the decades that followed. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Cuba plunged into the catastrophe of the Special Period, Mexico was among the few countries willing to maintain economic relations with the island. In 1994, at the height of the crisis, Mexico formalized a $350 million investment for the modernization of the Cienfuegos refinery, structured as a strategic swap, an exchange of debt for investment.

The Special Period is the obvious point of comparison for the current crisis, and the parallels are indeed stark. Cuba's 'war economics,' invoked by Díaz Canel, attempts to recreate the epic of a country that survived the fall of the USSR, but the current crisis is more serious because it begins from a comparatively worse position. Cuba's productive capacity has eroded far more than it had by 1991. Inflation surged by 77% in 2021, 39% in 2022, and 31% in 2023, while the Cuban peso has depreciated by 88%, and the estimated public deficit has reached nearly 20% of GDP. The sugar industry, once the backbone of the Cuban economy and a key measure of its endurance, has effectively ceased to exist as an industrial force: Cuba's harvest in 2025 fell below 200,000 metric tons for the first time in over two hundred years.

Into this void, Mexico stepped with renewed conviction. Under the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who follows a somewhat modernized version of old PRI-style revolutionary nationalism combined by a suspicion of American hegemony and a romanticized view of twentieth-century Latin American revolutionary movements), Mexico deepened its energy relationship with Cuba substantially. In 2023, López Obrador guaranteed 5.4 million barrels of oil to Cuba, a national record, at a value of $391 million. His successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, continued and accelerated this policy. Between May and August 2025 alone, Mexico dispatched 58 oil cargoes to Cuba at a total value of nearly 60 billion pesos, triple the volume of the final two years of the López Obrador presidency. By 2025, Mexico had become Cuba's largest oil supplier, accounting for nearly 44% of total imports.

The mechanism through which much of this energy trade was conducted is itself revealing. A Pemex subsidiary called Gasolinas Bienestar, created in 2022 specifically to supply hydrocarbons to Cuba on preferential terms, reported losses of nearly 5.8 billion pesos in its inaugural year due to the subsidised fuel provided to the island. Mexico was not simply selling oil to Cuba at market rates; it was, in effect, subsidizing the survival of the Cuban regime in much the same way Venezuela had done under Hugo Chávez, albeit on a smaller and more politically exposed scale.

That exposure became acute with the consolidation of the second Trump administration and the events of early 2026. On January 29th, Trump signed an executive order declaring a national emergency and authorizing the imposition of additional tariffs on imports from any country that directly or indirectly supplied oil to Cuba. The United States then began physically blocking oil tankers heading to Cuba in February, targeting Pemex by name and threatening Mexico with tariffs should it resist. The pressure on Sheinbaum was enormous, and it came at a moment when Mexico was already navigating a tense relationship with Washington over migration, drug cartel violence, and trade. Mexico temporarily halted new fuel shipments while diplomatic discussions were underway, with Sheinbaum describing the pause as a sovereign decision.

In spite of American pressure, Sheinbaum hasn’t abandoned the relationship with Cuba entirely. She has continued to denounce the embargo publicly, describing US sanctions as "suffocating" the Cuban population and insisting that Mexico retains the right to send fuel for humanitarian or commercial purposes. In February 2026, Mexico sent two ships carrying humanitarian aid to Cuba to help alleviate the effects of the blockade.

What this moment reveals, ultimately, is the profound structural tension at the heart of the Mexico-Cuba relationship in its current form. Mexico is the largest trading partner of the United States, profoundly integrated into the North American economic architecture in ways that Cuba's other sympathizers –Russia, Iran, and Nicaragua – are simply not. It cannot afford, in any straightforward material sense, to defy Washington to the point of rupture. And yet it cannot, without undermining a century and a half of diplomatic identity and domestic political mythology, simply abandon Cuba to the fate the Trump administration has prepared for it. The challenge, as Mexican and Cuban analysts alike have noted, lies in upholding a doctrine of self-determination and regional solidarity without becoming ensnared in the confrontation between Washington and Havana.

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