According to recent reports, Cuba has been gripped by severe shortages at the gas pump this year– with some local drivers reporting that they have been sleeping in their cars lately in gas-station lines that can last for several days just to get gasoline.
Today, the island nation’s acute fuel shortage came to a head, with Cuba’s communist government having to cancel Havana‘s annual May Day Parade, marking International Workers Day, due to lack of gasoline.
International Workers’ Day, also known as Labor Day in some countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of laborers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labor movement and occurs every year on 1 May, or the first Monday in May.
May Day celebrations usually draw hundreds of thousands of Cubans to the capital’s Revolution Square to participate in festivities to mark the socialist workers’ holiday, which commemorates the country’s labor movement.
But this year’s event has been called off, due to “economic reason” for the first time since Havana’s 1959 revolution (the parade had been canceled in 2020 and 2021, due to global COVID-19 pandemic).
Since 2000, Cuba has held a barter agreement with Venezuela in which crude oil is imported to Havana in exchange for educated doctors, teachers and government workers – but this relationship has been under a lot of duress in recent years, as Caracas struggled to manage its own fuel shortfalls. This year alone, Venezuela’s oil exports to Havana have dropped to 55,000 barrels per day from almost 80,000 bpd in 2020.
For the last twenty years Venezuela has been losing much revenue by not selling that oil on the international market, and it apparently just come to a point where it can no longer provide cash-free oil to Cuba.
“We still don’t have a clear idea of how we are going to get out of this,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel said in April about plummeting fuel reserves.
Cuba uses between 500-600 tons of fuel each day, but current stocks allow for only about 400 tons per day to be distributed.
Cuba’s crumbling economy has presented additional hurdles, including a reduced capacity to import diluents to refine low-quality crude oil.
Island’s communist government has blamed the combined influence of the US sanctions and the COVID-19 pandemic as being a deadly blow to its only remaining economic lifeline – tourism.
“There’s little work, as there’s little tourism, and you can’t work much as you have to save fuel,” one Havana tourist driver summed up.
