President Miguel Díaz-Canel said publicly on Monday 4 May 2026 that the Russian crude delivered by the Anatoly Kolodkin on 31 March is "already running out these days" and that Cuba has "no certainty about the arrival of another shipment"1. The statement is the first presidential acknowledgement of the fuel gap, made one day before the Antonio Guiteras plant tripped on 5 May.
The Kolodkin's 730,000-barrel delivery had powered the late-April window of restored grid stability in Havana. At Cuba's roughly 60,000-barrel-per-day baseline crude consumption, that cargo bought ten to twelve days of margin. The cushion has now been burnt, and the next Russian vessel positioned for Cuba is the Sovcomflot Universal, which Bloomberg locates 1,000 nautical miles offshore on 5 May at a pace that cannot reach port before its GL 134B licence expires.
The admission breaks an information pattern. Earlier crude tightness had been signalled through UNE bulletin language and indirect minister statements; the 4 May admission came from the president on the record. The 10 April back-channel between State Department officials and Havana and the GL 134B extension issued on 18 April have not produced a confirmed second tanker. The combination of those two facts means Havana is signalling, in public, that the Russian-Cuban supply chain is at the edge of what Sovcomflot can move under sanctions cover.
The diplomatic reading runs alongside the operational one. A presidential admission of fuel shortage is unusual in Cuban political grammar; it is normally absorbed into ministry-level language about "complex moments." Díaz-Canel's choice to put the words on his own record raises domestic expectation pressure on Moscow at exactly the moment Washington's 1 May sanctions order tightens the personal architecture around officials and their families.
