By Evaristo Lara
Added to the escalation of tension revolving around the relationship between the government of Washington and Havana is an announcement from the State Department sanctioning the state oil and gas company Unión Cuba-Petróleo (CUPET), which is in charge of receiving, distributing and selling fuel on the island.
Through a statement, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, accused CUPET of “reselling countless barrels of low energy on the secondary market, hoarding energy supplies for its military, intelligence and repressive forces, and rationing energy as a tool of social control.”
The Republican also stated that, for decades, the Cuban regime has managed available fuel as a measure to keep the Cuban population under control.
“While ordinary Cubans wait weeks to fill the tank of their cars and suffer constant blackoutsthe Castro family travels on a private jet, the government transports fake protesters on buses for publicity, and “The regime prioritizes maintaining the electricity supply in luxury tourist hotels,” he stressed.
With the aim of putting an end to this type of practice, the company, which also controls the extraction in Cuban crude oil fields, as well as its refining and distribution of fuel, was included in the OFAC (U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Administration) list, a situation that makes it impossible for it to establish any type of financial or business relationship in the United States.
In an interview granted to TelemundoJorge Piñón, researcher at the Energy Institute of the University of Texas, pointed out that for the Cuban government the sanction directed at CUPET represents a serious setback in facing the energy crisis triggered by the United States by preventing Venezuela from continuing to supply it with crude oil.
“CUPET has control of the three refineries in Cuba, the one in Havana, the one in Santiago de Cuba and the one in Cienfuegos; it has control of the oil pipelines, everything that is the liquefied gasoline business, the gasoline tanks that are frequently used for cooking, the control of lubricants, control over the asphalt. This will now put a brake on any large-volume transaction that it intends to carry out,” he emphasized.
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