Mexico triples oil aid to Cuba. Is Trump looking away?

Andres Oppenheimer
President Trump has called Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum “a very wonderful woman” and has praised her for her growing cooperation on migration, drugs and security issues. But he has mysteriously overlooked a glaring fact: She has significantly ramped up Mexico’s support for Cuba’s dictatorship.

Sheinbaum has tripled subsidized oil supplies to Cuba since she took office, according to a stunning new report from the respected think tank Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI).

Between May and August of 2025, Mexico shipped $3 billion in subsidized oil to the island. To put that in perspective, that’s three times the total of $1 billion sent during the previous two years, when former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador started the cheap oil shipments to Cuba, the report said.

In both the Sheinbaum and Lopez Obrador years, the deliveries were channeled through “Gasolina Bienestar,” a subsidiary of Mexico’s state-owned Pemex oil monopoly. The subsidiary was created by Lopez Obrador in 2022 specifically to ship cheap oil to Cuba, the report said.

Among the ships used for Mexico’s subsidized oil exports to Cuba was the Cuban oil tanker “Sandino,” which is on a U.S. Treasury blacklist for transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba, according to shipping records checked by MCCI.

Shamefully, Sheinbaum is sending oil below market prices to Cuba even though Mexico’s state oil company, Pemex, is deep in debt and parts of her own country are facing gasoline shortages. Her justification? When asked in August, she said Mexico was sending the oil to Cuba “for humanitarian reasons.”

As Verónica Ayala, the author of the MCCI report, told me, “It’s known that there’s an ideological affinity between the two governments. But it’s hard to understand why Mexico is giving this kind of help to Cuba when Pemex is deep in the red, and many parts of Mexico have urgent health and education problems.”

That wasn’t Sheinbaum’s only recent show of support for the region’s leftist dictatorships. On Oct. 13, she announced she will not attend the upcoming Summit of the Americas in protest because Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have been excluded.

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

“No, I won’t go,” Sheinbaum told reporters. “We don’t agree with the exclusion of any country.”

Hours earlier, Sheinbaum surprised many by being one of the few democratically elected leaders who did not congratulate Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado for her Nobel Peace Prize. When asked for her reaction to Machado’s prize, Sheinbaum said curtly, “No comment.”

Furthermore, last Dec. 17 Sheinbaum boasted at her daily morning press conference that Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua are among “the progressive governments with which we have many things in common,” according to her statements’ transcript in the government website.

There are several possible explanations for Sheinbaum’s increasingly open support for leftist dictatorships.

She was a Cuban regime supporter in her youth, and she may still have a romantic view of the island’s brutal regime. In addition, her support for the Cuban and Venezuelan regimes may be a way to compensate for her growing cooperation with Trump on immigration, drug and security issues. Her predecessor and political mentor, Lopez Obrador, and leftists in her Morena ruling party reportedly are far from happy with what many of them see as a submission to U.S. pressures.

The Sheinbaum government’s official reason — that it has a constitutional duty to support countries’ right to self-determination — is the weakest excuse of them all.

While Mexico’s constitution, in Article 89, does uphold the principle of non-intervention in other countries’ affairs, it says in the same paragraph that it should defend and promote human rights.

By that measure, Sheinbaum should be reminded that sending cheap oil to the decrepit Cuban regime and snubbing the Summit of the Americas in solidarity with the region’s most brutal dictatorships is a betrayal of Mexico’s constitutional commitment to human rights.

Unfortunately, Trump cares much more about deporting migrants — he has said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”— than about defending democracy or fundamental rights. But if he truly doesn’t like “communists,” as he claims, he should put pressure on Sheinbaum to stop propping up failed leftist dictatorships — or stop praising her as a “very wonderful woman.”