Cuban Energy Minister Vicente de la O Levy told a Havana press conference on Wednesday 13 May 2026 that Venezuelan crude supply to Cuba has been interrupted since November 2025. The date sits four months upstream of the 18 March 2026 PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., Venezuela's state oil company) carve-out previously framed as the proximate cause of Cuba's exclusion. De la O Levy described the situation as "so acute, critical, extremely tense" and stated that Cuba produces 40,000 barrels per day domestically against demand of 90,000 to 110,000 barrels per day.
Mexican supply, he said, ended in late January 2026. The dual cut leaves Cuba dependent on Russian-origin cargo that the US sanctions architecture has progressively walled off. De la O Levy's framing hardened the language Miguel Díaz-Canel used on 4 May when the President described the Anatoly Kolodkin's 730,000-barrel cargo as running out. "Out of fuel" is now the operative public framing from the Cuban government itself.
If the November 2025 date holds up, the chronology of the crisis is structurally upstream of the US sanctions instruments that followed. EO 14380, the secondary-tariff fuel-pressure order, was signed on 29 January 2026, two months after the supply collapse the minister now identifies. Plausible upstream causes include PDVSA operational degradation, Cuban inability to pay in dollars, or the December 2025 Hormuz disruption pulling Chinese-owned tankers previously lifting for PDVSA-to-Cuba routes onto Asian Brent buyers at the spike price. None of these are confirmed; each implies a different durable shape for the crisis.
De la O Levy's admission corrects both Lowdown's prior chronology and the dominant English-language framing. For any sanctions-relief negotiation that assumes restoring Venezuelan supply would close the loop, the re-weighting is material: a flow that stopped before the sanctions order was issued is not restored by lifting the order.
