To say that Venezuela “gave oil away to Cuba for twenty years” is part of a discursive scaffolding aimed at validating the state of siege imposed on the island.
There are lies that spread far and wide. Especially if they serve the interests of those in power, or if they flourish in times like these, fueled by a powerful industry of lies. Since January of this year, but especially in recent days, there is one claim that keeps coming up: the one accusing Cuba of receiving free oil from Venezuela over the past two decades. This resurgence in public discourse coincides with the recent licensing framework and the new oil agreement between Delcy Rodríguez’s Caracas and Donald Trump’s Washington. This contrast serves a certain media agenda: while the United States negotiates access to Venezuelan oil, the Caribbean island is portrayed as an insatiable parasite of the South American nation.
It’s an old argument. It was also used to characterize Cuba’s other economic relations with Latin American countries and, before that, to offer a simplistic description of its trade ties with socialist countries.
As for the Venezuelan case, the notion of a “gift” ignores the nature of the bilateral relationship established at the beginning of the century. Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro signed the Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement in 2000, amid a period of profound regional geopolitical realignment. The agreement established a framework for economic cooperation that included the supply of Venezuelan oil and the provision of Cuban services and technical assistance. It was not, therefore, a unilateral transfer of assets without obligations on the part of the recipient.
The agreement initially provided for a supply of up to 53,000 barrels per day of oil and petroleum products. The document provided for specific financing mechanisms for the operations, including extended terms, grace periods, and a preferential interest rate of two percent. The price of the hydrocarbons was tied to international market benchmarks. Therefore, describing the mechanism simply as “free oil” overlooks precisely those contractual elements that made it possible to understand how the relationship worked.
This does not mean, however, that it was a conventional sale under strictly commercial terms. The Venezuelan supply included preferential financial terms and, as bilateral cooperation developed, a significant energy subsidy component. The economic relationship between the two countries was much more complex than a simple sale: it combined oil, credit, investment, government cooperation, and the export of Cuban professional services.
The scope of services was particularly significant. Cuba provided Venezuela with doctors, healthcare personnel, specialists, and technical assistance as part of social programs promoted by the government of Hugo Chávez. The Barrio Adentro program is probably the best-known example of that cooperation. The exchange between the two countries must therefore be understood within a broader economic framework, in which energy flows were part of a set of bilateral relations rather than a series of unilateral donations. Only those who believe that health care, education, sports training, or culture are worthless simply because they are not traded on the global market like oil, rare earth minerals, or diamonds can deliberately claim that Venezuela was the only one contributing anything to that relationship.
On the other hand, unlike the provision of Cuban services, the volume of oil shipments was far from constant. During the peak years of energy cooperation, Venezuela sent more than 100,000 barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products to Cuba. The scale of these flows made Venezuela the island’s primary energy supplier and certainly created a high degree of dependence on Venezuelan production capacity. Energy cooperation was also accompanied by infrastructure projects. Among these, the rehabilitation of the Cienfuegos refinery—carried out through a Cuban-Venezuelan joint venture—stood out. The project was part of the expansion of energy ties between the two countries and the economic integration strategy promoted during those years.
However, the Venezuelan crisis radically altered this scenario. The collapse of Venezuelan oil production progressively reduced Caracas’s ability to maintain the supply volumes that had characterized the previous decade. As early as 2012, shipments to Cuba began to decline, and by the end of that decade, the island was facing growing energy vulnerability.
Recent data clearly show that this trend has accelerated in recent years. According to estimates based on ship movements and PDVSA documents, Venezuela shipped about 56,000 barrels per day to Cuba in 2023. In 2024, the average dropped to approximately 32,000 barrels per day. In certain subsequent months, even lower levels were recorded, reaching as low as about 8,000 barrels per day at one point.
Venezuela’s transformation also altered the economic terms of the relationship. The crisis at PDVSA and the need to secure liquid revenue led Caracas to direct a growing proportion of its exports toward markets capable of generating foreign exchange. China took on particular importance within this strategy. In that context, maintaining the old preferential supply arrangements with Cuba became materially more difficult.
Venezuela’s new energy landscape is now unfolding amid an increasingly close relationship with Washington. The oil agreement announced in 2026 between the Venezuelan government and the United States calls for investments, the development of oil fields, and a restructuring of the bilateral energy relationship. At the same time, US policy toward Cuba has sought to restrict the supply of Venezuelan oil to the island. The US government’s rhetoric on this issue uses the “oil gift” narrative as a pretext. Earlier this year, Trump insisted that Cuba was living off Venezuela and that it could no longer continue to do so. Marco Rubio, the chief architect of the “maximum pressure” policy toward Cuba, responds to every question about the oil embargo with the lie that there is no oil embargo at all—that it’s simply a matter of Cuba having previously consumed free Venezuelan oil, and that this has now come to an end.
To say that Venezuela “gave oil to Cuba for twenty years” is part of a rhetorical framework designed to justify the state of siege imposed on the island. A framework characterized by its mendacity. In the relationship between Cuba and Venezuela, oil was supplied on preferential terms, there was concessional financing, and there was a significant subsidy component. But there were also contracts, financial obligations, economic cooperation, professional services, investments, and exchange mechanisms between two sovereign states that sought an alternative path to development—and for a time, succeeded in doing so.
Whether that model ultimately exacerbated—or at least perpetuated—that structural vulnerability of the Cuban economy, namely its dependence on fossil fuel imports, is another matter. PDVSA’s production crisis demonstrated the material limits of that dependence and contributed to Cuba’s subsequent energy and economic crisis. But the failure or exhaustion of an integration model does not retrospectively transform its operations into “gifts.” Such a reckoning is nothing more than opportunism.
Translated from Spanish by The Assembly Media team.
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano