On 18 March 2026 the US Treasury issued a broad authorisation permitting PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., the Venezuelan state oil firm) to sell crude on world markets, including to US refiners, in response to Iran-war supply pressure1. The licence carried an explicit carve-out: transactions involving Cuba, Russia, Iran, North Korea and certain Chinese entities remain prohibited.
The practical effect is a two-tier settlement of Venezuela policy. Most of the world regains access to PDVSA crude at a moment when Hormuz disruption has pushed refiners to scramble for non-Iranian supply. The Cuban state, historically PDVSA's single most politically-loaded customer, does not. Cuba is grouped with strategic adversaries rather than with ordinary sanctions targets, which is a structural categorisation rather than a tactical one.
The instruments involved are the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (CACR), the statutory framework Treasury administers through its Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and the 1996 LIBERTAD Act underpinning them. GAESA (Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., the Cuban military's economic conglomerate) is the specific state actor blocked from buying. Payments under the general licence route to a US-controlled account with gold and cryptocurrency settlement prohibited, closing the workaround channels Havana has used in previous tight-fuel episodes. The carve-out is the policy decision around which the remainder of the Cuba dispatch is organised.
