Mexico’s shameful aid to Cuba

Between May and August 2025, Mexico sent $3 billion in subsidized oil to the island, three times more than the $1 billion sent during the previous two years under the former president’s government. Andrés Manuel López Obradoraccording to the report.

All of these shipments were sent through “Gasolina Bienestar”, a subsidiary of the Mexican state oil monopoly Pemex. The subsidiary was created by López Obrador in 2022 specifically to ship cheap oil to Cuba.

Among the ships used for subsidized oil exports to Cuba is the Cuban oil tanker ‘Sandino’, which is on the US Treasury blacklist for transporting oil from Venezuela to Cubaaccording to shipping activity records analyzed by MCCI.

Shamefully, Sheinbaum is sending subsidized oil to Cuba even though Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex, is in serious financial trouble and some parts of his own country are facing gasoline shortages.

Your justification? The president said in August that Mexico was sending oil to Cuba “for humanitarian reasons.”

Veronica Ayalaauthor of the MCCI report, told me that “we know that there is an ideological affinity between the two governments. But it is difficult to understand why Mexico gives this type of support to Cuba when Pemex is in the red and there are latent needs in health and education.”

This was not Sheinbaum’s only recent show of support for the region’s left-wing dictatorships. On October 13, the president of Mexico announced that she will not participate in the next Summit of the Americas in protest against the exclusion of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

The Dominican Republic, which will host the largest meeting of heads of state in the hemisphere in early December, excluded the three dictatorships from the meeting. This follows the precedent set by former US President Joe Biden at a similar summit in 2022 in Los Angeles, where he refused to invite authoritarian regimes.

“No, I will not attend,” Sheinbaum told reporters. “We have never agreed that any country should be excluded.”

Hours earlier, Sheinbaum surprised many by not congratulating the leader of the Venezuelan opposition Maria Corina Machado for his Nobel Peace Prize. When reporters asked Sheinbaum his reaction to Machado’s award, Sheinbaum replied dryly: “No comment.”

Previously, Sheinbaum had said in his morning press conference on December 17 that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are among “the progressive governments with which we have many things in common”, according to the transcript of his words on the official Mexican government website.

There are several possible explanations for Sheinbaum’s increasingly open support for left-wing dictatorships.

The president was a left-wing activist in her youthand you can even get a romantic view of Cuba’s police regime.

Furthermore, his support for the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes may be a way to offset his growing cooperation with Trump on immigration, drugs and security issues.

His predecessor and political mentor, López Obrador, and the left wing of the ruling Morena party are not at all pleased with what many consider Mexico’s submission to American pressure.

The Sheinbaum Government’s official reason – that it has a constitutional duty to support the principle of self-determination of peoples – is the weakest excuse of all.

Although the Mexican Constitution, in its article 89, enshrines the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries, it establishes in the same paragraph that Mexico must defend and promote human rights.

In this sense, it must be pointed out to Sheinbaum that subsidizing the decrepit Cuban regime and not participating in the Summit of the Americas in solidarity with the most brutal dictatorships in the region is a betrayal of Mexico’s constitutional commitment to human rights.

Unfortunately, not even Trump reminds him of this.