Cuba Gasoline Lines Return as Venezuelan Oil Lifeline Suddenly Vanishes

As Venezuela’s oil abruptly disappears, Cuba’s streets fill again with gasoline lines, dark humor, and quiet fear, exposing how a geopolitical shock becomes a daily survival test for ordinary people, retirees, and workers already living on the edge of scarcity.

When Caracas Turns Off the Tap

Under the brutal Havana sun, perched on his motorcycle and barely moving in a gasoline line, Jesús Méndez, sixty-six, shrugs with Caribbean irony at the latest twist in Cuba’s energy saga. “Esto está duro… y tomó viagra para estar duro,” he jokes, a laugh masking fatigue, he told EFE. The line curls past a service station near the Malecón, engines idling, patience thinning.

The trigger came from outside the island. The sudden cutoff of Venezuelan oil, following the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, has resurrected a familiar Cuban ritual: waiting. Long queues at gas stations—colas—are back, not as rumor or memory, but as lived reality. This time, many Cubans say, the fear feels sharper.

For Yanely, forty-six, who has spent an hour without advancing a meter, these are not the “phantom lines” of past crises, when drivers waited days outside empty stations for a tanker that might never arrive. “Ahora es pánico,” she says, describing a rush driven by uncertainty rather than confirmed shortages. “La gente se previene… viene a llenar por temor,” she explains, standing outside a station overlooking the sea, she told EFE.

According to estimates cited by Cuban officials and independent analysts, Venezuelan crude supplied roughly thirty percent of Cuba’s energy needs in 2025. Losing that flow opens a gap the state cannot easily close, constrained by a chronic lack of hard currency and limited access to alternative suppliers. The shock is immediate, but its consequences are structural.

Panic Lines and Unequal Fuel

The new gasoline lines reveal something else: scarcity no longer distributes evenly. Across Havana, stations that sell fuel in U.S. dollars overflow with vehicles, while those charging in Cuban pesos sit silent, blocked by orange cones and empty tanks. EFE reporters observed the contrast street by street, a portrait of a country where currency determines mobility.

The government dollarized part of the fuel network last year, seeking fresh revenue as tourism and remittances fell sharply. In the current crunch, those dollar stations have been prioritized. The result is a familiar Cuban paradox: fuel exists, but not for everyone.

Four hours into his wait, Carlos, seventy-six, grips the steering wheel of his aging car. He bought dollars on the informal market after months of frustration with Ticket, the state-run mobile app that manages gasoline queues and can lead to waits of up to 2 months in Havana. “En moneda nacional no han surtido más,” he says quietly. “Aquí nadie gana en dólares. Hay que seguir luchando,” he told EFE.

This dual system sharpens inequality in a society that once prided itself on rationed sameness. Scholars writing in journals such as Cuban Studies have noted how post-crisis reforms increasingly stratify access to essentials by currency, reshaping social hierarchies without formally naming them. Gasoline, once a logistical concern, now marks who can move and who must stay put.

An Economy Running on Fumes

For many Cubans, the gasoline line is not about driving—it is about anticipation. Ramón García, seventy, a retired worker, says he learned to store small amounts of fuel at home long ago. But when he watched the U.S. military operation in Venezuela on January 3, he sensed a turning point. “Vine porque no sé lo que va a pasar mañana,” he explains. “Estoy casi seguro de que se va a notar,” he told EFE.

Independent economist Miguel Alejandro Hayes puts numbers to that fear. In a study shared with EFE last week, he estimates that the end of Venezuelan oil shipments could trigger a 27% contraction in GDP, a 60% rise in food prices, and a 75% increase in transportation costs. In an economy already battered by inflation, power outages, and falling real wages, such figures suggest not a dip but a cliff.

Cuba’s domestic oil offers little relief. What exists is heavy and sulfur-rich, difficult to refine, and unsuitable for much of the island’s aging infrastructure. Méndez, still inching forward on his motorcycle, voices the question many ask aloud: “¿De dónde vamos a sacar gasolina si aquí el petróleo está lleno de azufre y no sirve?” he told EFE.

The broader context matters. Since the early two-thousands, Cuba’s energy matrix has depended on political alliances as much as geology. The partnership with Venezuela once cushioned the island against market prices and sanctions. Its collapse now exposes the fragility of an economy operating with minimal reserves, limited credit, and few buffers against external shocks.

Yet the crisis is not only macroeconomic. It is domestic and intimate. Transportation underpins food distribution, hospital access, and informal work. When fuel tightens, everything slows. Families calculate trips. Ambulances wait. Buses thin out. The line at the pump becomes a line through daily life.

At the Malecón, engines restart and shut off in rhythm, drivers sharing jokes and rumors. Dark humor, as always, softens the blow. But beneath it runs a familiar Cuban calculation: how long this will last, and what will be asked next.

For now, the island waits. The queues stretch. And as the Venezuelan oil lifeline fades, Cuba’s endurance—honed by decades of scarcity—faces another test, one measured not in speeches or slogans, but in liters, hours, and the quiet arithmetic of survival.

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