Cuba runs out of jet fuel as Donald Trump squeezes oil supplies

Cuba has told international airlines that it will not be able to supply them with jet fuel from Tuesday, as US President Donald Trump squeezes the communist island’s oil supplies.

The measure, at the height of the tourist season, has prompted Air Canada to suspend flights to the island and is expected to hit US, Spanish, Panamanian and Mexican airlines. The notice, issued at the weekend, said the measure would last until March 11.

Airlines that continue to serve Cuba may add refuelling stops in nearby Caribbean islands.

Cuba has received no oil or fuel for a month, after Trump cut off Venezuelan supplies to the island and pressed Mexico to stop its shipments. Havana does not produce enough domestically to meet its needs.

The end to refuelling will further pressure Cuba’s tourism industry, which experienced an 18 per cent drop in visitors last year compared with 2024 and is a vital source of scarce foreign exchange.

Many of the island’s hotels never recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic and more have closed over the past year. Two large beach resorts on Cayo Coco on the north coast have shuttered recently and some tourists have been relocated as the fuel shortages bite. The resorts could not immediately be reached for comment.

Spanish chain Meliá Hotels International said it had closed three of its 35 hotels in Cuba and moved affected guests to other hotels to make more efficient use of fuel supplies.

“We have fuel, but we must not waste it,” it said.

Many tourism businesses in Cuba are partially or wholly controlled by Grupo de Administración Empresarial (Gaesa), a military-run conglomerate that controls about half the economy. A year ago, the Trump administration included Gaesa on the US Cuba Restricted List, which bans direct financial transactions.

Cuba last received oil on January 9 from Mexico, which at the weekend sent 814 tonnes of food and other humanitarian aid as it seeks a diplomatic solution with the US to resume oil shipments.

The island long relied on Venezuelan oil in exchange for political and counter-intelligence support. Mexico overtook Venezuela as its top supplier last year but appears to have balked at Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on any country sending oil to Cuba.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel last week said he was open to US talks without “preconditions” — as long as regime change was not on the table.

The government has announced measures including fuel rationing, a four-day week for workers at state companies, the cancellation of classes at Havana University and the postponement of cultural and sporting events.

Díaz-Canel likened the restrictions to the “special period” of the 1990s, when Cuba suffered economic ruin after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main benefactor.

Even before the latest crisis, Cubans have become used to regular, increasingly lengthy power outages, as the country’s Soviet-era power plants fail. During the past month, power cuts have hit most of the capital on a daily basis and can last more than a day in some provinces, residents say.

Public transport has been severely curtailed, and drivers queue for hours at fuel stations for increasingly scarce supplies, which are only available at prices most cannot afford.

But deputy prime minister Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga, a grandnephew of Fidel Castro, said the government had “introduced measures to diversify fuel imports”, telling state television “we are not going to collapse”.

Russia has supplied Cuba in the past and Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov slammed the US’s “suffocating tactics” and said Moscow was seeking “to provide all possible assistance”.

Because Cuba long received oil and fuel under preferential deals, experts said it had few incentives to upgrade its crumbling infrastructure.

At the Antonio Maceo thermoelectric plant in eastern Cuba, hit by last week’s outage, 80 per cent of the parts needed to keep the plant running were made by its workers, state newspaper Granma reported last year.

The plant was expected to have a lifespan of only three decades when it started up nearly 60 years ago, and its output has virtually halved from its peak of 500MW in the 1980s.

The energy crisis was “just another angle of the island’s economic malaise”, said Ricardo Torres, a research fellow at the American University in Washington and an expert on Cuba’s power infrastructure. Its economy shrank 1.1 per cent in 2024, according to the World Bank.

While spending on electricity, gas and water facilities increased to 13 per cent of Cuba’s total investment in 2024, it was dwarfed by the 37 per cent spent on hotels and tourism, he noted.

The Cuban government has resorted to energy-saving plans in the past but has never met its ambitious renewable energy goals.

The island struck agreements with Beijing to build solar parks, but solar supplies only about 10 per cent of daily generation, Torres said. Wealthier citizens have imported solar panels themselves, bringing them in by plane and installing them on rooftops, but their cost is out of reach for most.

Havana contracted eight Turkish floating power plants that by 2023 supplied 23 per cent of national electricity generation. But most of the barges left after they were not paid, local businesspeople said. Only one barge now remains, and it is suffering a lack of fuel.