22OCT

Cuba blames blockade for 64% gas rise

4 min read

17:12UTC

Resolution 155/2026 took a 10kg cooking gas cylinder from 213 to 350 CUP on 16 July, and Havana named the American blockade. The designations it pointed at were three days old.

← Back to Cuba opens oilfields, US cuts dollar routes Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsDeveloping

Key takeaway

Havana blamed 72-hour-old sanctions for a price its own minister had already explained better.

Resolution 155/2026 took a standard 10kg cooking gas cylinder from 213 to 350 CUP (Cuban pesos) on Thursday 16 July, a 64 per cent rise reaching 1,707,763 contracted customers, 26 per cent of them in Havana and a further 37 per cent across Matanzas, Villa Clara, Camagüey, Holguín and Santiago de Cuba⁠¹. The Ministry of Finance and Prices set liquefied petroleum gas (GLP, the bottled fuel most Cuban kitchens cook on) at 35 CUP per kilogram, effective the day it appeared in Gaceta Oficial No. 59⁠². Cuba's state gas company cut piped supply to Havana on 3 June; the households that fell back on cylinders are the ones now paying 350 CUP for one.

The state justified the rise, as reported by Granma and Escambray, by the "recrudecimiento del bloqueo económico, comercial, financiero y energético" and its effect on oil imports⁠³. Cubadebate and the Cuban Foreign Ministry were unreachable throughout the reporting window, so that attribution reaches us through state-media pickup rather than a primary text. Washington did escalate. The US State Department designated the fuel importers Enetec S.A. and Coreydan S.A. on Monday 13 July for operating in Cuba's energy sector⁠⁴. Those designations were three days old when the price took effect, and a decree carrying a customer count broken down by province is not drafted in seventy-two hours.

Havana's own ministers had already put the supply failure somewhere older. On Friday 3 July, Vice Prime Minister and Foreign Trade Minister Óscar Pérez-Oliva said Cuba now takes fuel in shipping containers rather than tanker cargoes, calling the arrangement "unsustainable for an economy", in remarks reported by Periódico Cubano and carried by no other outlet⁠⁵. He would not say who moves it, in what volume, or whether the state or private operators control it. Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy dated the interruption of Venezuelan crude to November 2025, and no tanker has reached Matanzas, Santiago or Mariel since OFAC (the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control) designated the state oil company CUPET (Cuba Petróleo) on 11 June.

Sanctions sit in the causal chain and the humanitarian cost of that is real: the fuel famine is externally imposed, and a government facing one that raises the price of a scarce good is doing what governments do. The narrower point survives that steelman. The state reached for a three-day-old escalation to explain a price its own Vice Prime Minister had already explained better, and earlier, with a fact about containers. El Toque's index put the informal dollar at 660 CUP on 16 July against 645 on 4 July⁠⁶, so the cylinder costs more in a currency worth less.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

GLP stands for gas licuado, bottled cooking gas sold in refillable cylinders that most Cuban households use for stovetop cooking. The state just raised the price of a standard 10kg cylinder from 213 to 350 Cuban pesos (CUP), a jump of 64 per cent, affecting over 1.7 million contracted customers. The government blames the US trade embargo (a decades-old set of restrictions on trade and financial dealings with Cuba) for making fuel imports harder and more expensive. Whatever the cause, the practical effect for a Cuban family is the same: cooking gas now costs well over half again what it did the day before.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Cuba's domestic crude production runs at roughly 40,000 barrels a day against demand of 90,000 to 110,000 barrels, a gap that widened when Venezuelan crude supply was interrupted from November 2025. Bottled gas depends on the same import channel as diesel and petrol, so any squeeze on tanker arrivals reaches the household cylinder within weeks.

OFAC's 11 June designation of CUPET, the state oil company that handles nearly all import licensing, closed the private-buyer loophole that had briefly let non-state importers route around sanctioned channels. With CUPET itself under sanction, the routes available for replacing lost Venezuelan crude narrowed further, pushing the state toward the container-based imports Pérez-Oliva described on 3 July.

What could happen next?

Consequence
Households outside Havana, who make up the bulk of contracted GLP customers, absorb most of the price increase in a population with lower average incomes than the capital.
Meaning
The state's willingness to raise a basic household price rather than ration further signals it is choosing price rationing over supply rationing for cooking fuel specifically.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Cuba's 1990s Special Period followed the abrupt end of Soviet oil subsidies and produced years of fuel rationing and price controls. CEPAL's own mid-July assessment already frames 2026's contraction as being on the scale of that collapse.

Counter-parallel: Unlike the Special Period, when the state had no functioning price mechanism at all, Havana is now using an explicit price signal, a named ministry resolution setting a public per-kilogram rate, rather than blanket rationing, a tool it largely avoided in the 1990s.

The immediate impact falls on 1,707,763 contracted GLP customers nationwide: 26 per cent in Havana, a further 37 per cent spread across Matanzas, Villa Clara, Camagüey, Holguín and Santiago de Cuba, meaning the rise lands hardest outside the capital, where incomes are typically lower.

Structurally, the same 16 July Gaceta Oficial issue also carried Decree 156/2026, amending the Council of Ministers' own authority to approve prices and tariffs, and a second resolution setting new piped-gas rates. Three pricing instruments in one issue suggest a coordinated repricing exercise, not an isolated response to one shortage.

Consensus view: State media outlets including Granma and Escambray attribute the 64 per cent cylinder price rise entirely to the "recrudecimiento" (escalation) of the US blockade's effect on oil imports, framing Resolution 155/2026 as a defensive response to an externally imposed fuel shortage.

Counter-view: Cuba's own deputy prime minister, Óscar Pérez-Oliva, admitted on 3 July, thirteen days before the price rise, that the island had already shifted to importing fuel by shipping container rather than tanker cargo, a change he called "unsustainable for an economy" without naming US sanctions as the trigger. His account traces the same shortage to a supply-chain shift that predates the specific escalation the pricing resolution cites.

Key tension: Whether the shortage behind the 350 CUP price is a fresh sanctions shock or the continuation of a structural shift Havana's own ministers were describing weeks earlier.

First Reported In

Update #11 · Cuba blames the blockade for a 64% gas rise

Granma· 17 Jul 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

US sanctions Cuba's national oil company

CUPET's 11 June OFAC designation closed the private-buyer oil channel that fed the container-import shortage underlying the 16 July gas price rise.

Occurred 11 Jun 2026

Read story →

CUPET listing leaves Cuba with no tankers

The tanker drought following CUPET's designation forced fuel imports into shipping containers, the shortage Resolution 155/2026 priced.

Occurred 18 Jun 2026

Read story →

This Event

Cuba blames blockade for 64% gas rise

A 64 per cent rise passes Cuba's fuel shortage straight to 1.7 million registered households, and the state's explanation does not fit its own calendar.

Led to

Coast Guard stops a Cuba-bound fuel ship

Havana's July statement that fuel now arrives in containers, not tankers, preceded the Coast Guard's account of fuel in a cargo ship's ballast tanks.

Occurred 2 Oct 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

UN General Assembly

The Assembly passed last year's resolution against the US embargo by 165 votes to 7, with 12 abstentions, and votes again on 28 October. That count is the baseline against which Havana's lobbying claims and Washington's pressure will be measured.

Mexican Navy (Secretaría de Marina)

A Mexican Navy team inspected Grace at Progreso and found fuel in its ballast tanks, according to the US Coast Guard. The account of Mexico's role comes from Washington; the Mexican government's own position on the stop is not on record in the sources reviewed.

Pedro Monreal, independent Cuban economist

Monreal says the gazette contains no rule for the exchange-house licence ADT 64 received, so nobody knows how a second firm could apply. He says a representative rate would need at least ten houses in five provinces, Havana included.

Prisoners Defenders and OCDH (Madrid-based exile monitors)

Prisoners Defenders counted a record 1,351 political prisoners at the end of September, and OCDH logged at least 344 repressive actions that month. OCDH asked the European Union on 11 September to investigate possible trafficking in Cuba's medical brigade in Italy.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier

Uthmeier announced a no-bond state warrant for Raúl Castro on 19 October over the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue shootdown, after reopening the state investigation last year. The four men killed flew for a Miami exile group, and the warrant restricts Castro's travel rather than reaching him in Cuba.

Cuban government (Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla)

Rodríguez said on 21 October that Washington is pressing governments to abstain or leave the hall in the 28 October UN vote and called Florida's Raúl Castro warrant worthless. Havana is presenting its October oil and trade rules as openings and the US measures as an energy blockade.

Written with AI from Lowdown's published reporting. Not individually reviewed by an editor. Editorial standards.