The collaboration is not new. In February 2023, former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) awarded Miguel Díaz-Canel the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor given to foreign nationals. The ceremony highlighted bilateral cooperation in healthcare, especially the deployment of Cuban doctors to Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Cuban financing mechanism that, in November 2019, was questioned by UN rapporteurs over concerns that working conditions were likely considered forced labor.
It was known that the former president and founder of the Morena party held a proud and romantic vision of dictatorship. Today, this political stance remains unchanged. In line with her predecessor and the party, in October 2025, President Sheinbaum announced that she would not attend the Summit of the Americas in the Dominican Republic, citing the same argument AMLO used to sabotage the summit in Los Angeles in 2022: both leaders openly said they would not attend events that excluded the dictatorships of the hemisphere: Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. Being consistent, and more recently, Sheinbaum was among the few leaders who refused to congratulate Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado on her Nobel Peace Prize; asked to respond to the award, Sheinbaum offered a “no comment” reply.
It is fondly remembered in Mexico’s national history how the country stood alone in 1962 in defense of Cuba as the only nation to abstain from voting in favor of the island’s expulsion from the Organization of American States, opposed the imposition of economic sanctions, and maintained diplomatic relations with Castro’s government. But those were different times, and the position had a logic in the context of the Cold War; it was an arrangement that allowed Mexico to serve as an intermediary and avoid a total shutdown of communications between Washington and Havana.
Today, the former practical arrangement has been transformed into a series of lame and confusing excuses. With the fall of the Maduro regime in January, Mexico automatically became Cuba’s first oil supplier. After the fact, the government justified the new state of affairs as benign “humanitarian aid” and made no effort to devise any strategy or explanation to differentiate between the Cuban people and the criminal regime. Likely, the Mexican government believed that being Cuba’s last supplier would give it leverage to mediate and negotiate as it had in the past. But a portion of the equation was out of place: Mexico’s previous role as an intermediary cannot be maintained by a leader and political party that has openly supported the dictatorship. To the contrary, the government has now irresponsibly placed the country in an unstable position during a year that required methodical planning and prudence to safeguard the country’s economic future.
Support for the regime is not new. Mexico has sent oil to Cuba since the 1970s, but the newly disclosed quantities and schemes of the Sheinbaum administration are more serious, at least for four reasons: the tense geopolitical context and priorities of the Trump administration in the hemisphere, the significant increase of oil shipments in 2025, the trade interests that Mexico must prioritize and safeguard in 2026, and the current ruinous financial state of Pemex.
As the US threatened countries that ship oil to Cuba with tariffs, Sheinbaum said in a morning press conference that the foreign ministry had to “explain to the State Department the meaning of a humanitarian crisis,” and that would solve things. Yet this both provocative and submissive stance vis-à-vis Washington is also promoted at a time when Mexico is more isolated than ever. During the last years, Mexico has lost allies in Latin America. Peru severed diplomatic relations with Mexico more than two months ago in protest over Sheinbaum’s decision to grant asylum to former prime minister Betssy Chávez, who had been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison on rebellion charges. Previously, in April 2024, Ecuador broke diplomatic relations with Mexico after granting asylum to former vice president Jorge Glas, whom Ecuador considers a convicted criminal evading justice.
The decision regarding Cuba is not only domestically imprudent but also sends a signal of irresponsibility abroad, making the country vulnerable on other foreign policy fronts, such as trade negotiations. This is a carelessness that competitors will seize on; it will be difficult, for example, to support the USMCA and its ideological underpinnings whilst backing the Cuban dictatorship. In reality, the problem is that Mexico lacks a clear foreign policy toward Cuba, because that would first require differentiating between Cubans and the regime; without that, the humanitarian arguments naturally fall apart.
As days passed and the pressure from the US government increased, the complicity became more manifest. Journalists disclosed that Pemex reported to US authorities only 13 percent of the actual value of the crude oil and refined petroleum products it shipped to Cuba in 2025. The Mexican government has handled oil deliveries with extreme opacity, contradicting its recent, self-congratulatory narrative of pride in providing humanitarian aid, and has veiled oil donations as purchase agreements. Following consistent nonpayment, the debts are eventually forgiven and recognized as a loss.
At the beginning of the 2000s, the close association between Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez allowed Cuba to receive 100,000 barrels per day from Venezuela. So far, in 2026, the island has received only one shipment from Mexico, totaling 84,000 barrels, which would translate to approximately 3,000 barrels per day. Mexico has been sending oil to Cuba for decades, but since Sheinbaum took office in October 2024, shipments to Cuba have tripled, according to a new report by the civil organization Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity. Between January 1993 and November 2025, Mexico’s oil exports to Cuba totaled more than $1.947 billion, but fifty-seven percent of that amount was shipped during the first 13 months of Sheinbaum’s administration, according to data from Mexico’s central bank.
According to some estimates, Mexico sent 12,000 barrels per day to Cuba in 2025, and from May to August 2025 alone, $3 billion, three times the roughly $1 billion delivered over the previous two years, during AMLO’s administration. The total support to Cuba has accumulated an estimated debt of 27.569 billion pesos. Moreover, there are suggestions that oil imports are not only for domestic consumption but also sold to obtain foreign currencies. Besides the negative standing growing from these decisions and indecisions, it is important to note that the oil was provided by a bankrupt company unable to pay suppliers and carrying the infamous tag of being the “most indebted oil company in the world” with accumulated liabilities totaling 84 billion, in the most conservative estimates. As a mismanaged company, its production has steadily declined, mainly because its administration has been guided by ideological whims that have thwarted necessary partnerships with the private sector and because financial constraints have left the company unable to pay suppliers and service providers, disrupting operations and undermining productivity.
The reaction to replacing a lifeline long supplied by the Maduro regime was entirely foreseeable. Attempting to step into any of Maduro’s roles was never a prudent foreign policy move. Sadly, it is consistent with a trend of isolationism and the prevalence of partisan ideologies. The confusion about how to deal with Cuba, its regime, and the US is a symptom of a broader confusion about Mexico’s foreign policy direction, especially harmful in 2026, when the country precisely needs to navigate complex trade negotiations and reinforce its position in North America. Unfortunately, the current ambivalence will be hard to reverse because it stems from giving precedence to party factions rather than national strategic priorities.
