How Mexico Fueled GAESA in Cuba Without Transparency
Oil without oversight
HAVANA TIMES – Between 2023 and 2025, while Mexico’s state oil company Pemex transferred more than US $1.5 billion worth of oil to Cuba — a figure the company reported to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) — blackouts on the island did not let up. On the contrary, they stretched for as long as two consecutive days across much of the country.
The figure appears in the report “Mexico-Cuba Agreements: A Legal Framework Without Checks and Balances or Accountability,” by the organizations Consorcio Justicia y Gobierno and Análisis Político A.C. (Gapac), to which El Toque had access. Drawing on official and journalistic sources, testimony, and reports from human rights organizations, the investigation documents bilateral cooperation between the two governments since 2022.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has shifted her rhetoric on oil shipments depending on the level of diplomatic and economic pressure from the United States to force changes on the island. At times, she has defended the oil shipments as an act of solidarity, and at others as a commercial decision by Pemex.
The report provides evidence to argue that these shifts in rhetoric matter less than the fact that, regardless of the narrative Sheinbaum uses to justify the cooperation, the real recipient of these resources is not a government accountable to its population, but GAESA. It is a military conglomerate that controls the main sectors of the Cuban economy and that not even the island’s own government can audit.
Mexican cooperation has not been limited to oil. The report documents that the Cuban doctors program, operated through IMSS-Bienestar, cost more than 2.5 billion Mexican pesos (about US $144 million) between 2022 and 2026, without any federal agency publishing an impact assessment.
Of the approximately 100,000 pesos per month (US $5,700) that each doctor costs, 27,000 pesos are deposited directly into a Cuban state account — not into the hands of the contracted professional — and, according to the report, the Cuban state retains between 75% and 95% of the agreed salary. Added to that are 1.576 billion pesos (US $91 million) in Cuban medicines awarded without an international competitive bidding process, as well as another 2.004 billion pesos (US $115 million) in 2025 alone for lodging, food, and transportation for the medical personnel.
The report also identifies at least 111 million pesos (US $6.4 million) awarded directly, without public bidding, between 2022 and 2023 to Neuronic Mexicana S.A., the Mexican representative of the Cuban laboratory AICA, part of the state conglomerate BioCubaFarma.
A former official with Mexico’s Superior Audit Office stated that the then-director of Birmex explicitly instructed officials to favor that company. To date, no Mexican authority has opened a formal investigation into the matter.
Added to this are more than 4,800 tons of “humanitarian aid” sent to Cuba since February 2026 and nearly US $35 million for the Sembrando Vida program on the island, with no independent mechanism to verify where the resources ultimately went.
“Food, medicines… we have also had no clarity about who the recipients have been, who received them, or which population has been served,” Liliana Obregón, director of Gapac, told Martí Noticias. The researcher believes that international cooperation must distinguish between the needs of the civilian population and institutional support for the Cuban state.
Mexico’s Secretariat of Foreign Affairs confirmed, in response to an information request from the newspaper El Universal, that the Cuban government asked for information about the cooperation to be classified as confidential for five years.
The report by Gapac and Consorcio Justicia links all this information to a broader institutional change in Mexico: the elimination in 2024 of the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI) left these expenditures without the oversight body that, for two decades, had been able to demand accountability.
Its successor, Transparencia para el Pueblo, is not autonomous — it is part of the executive branch — operates with just 2.3% of the budget that INAI had, and, according to the report, denies access to information in 99.6% of the cases.
The erosion of institutional checks and balances — further facilitated by “the capture of the legislative majority” and the judicial reform that subjected judges to popular election — opened a space that the Cuban regime, through GAESA, “has taken advantage of to secure Mexican public resources without audits, without legislative debate, and without citizens having any way to demand information,” the report’s researchers maintain.
First published in Spanish by El Toque and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
Well written with numbers that make people understand how bady Cuba treats the people they send on overseas contracts