A Russia-flagged tanker carrying some 700,000 barrels of crude arrived in Cuba's Matanzas Bay at daybreak on Tuesday, according to a Reuters witness and shipping data, marking the first significant oil delivery since the Trump administration cut off the island's fuel supply.
The Anatoly Kolodkin vessel, under U.S. sanctions, entered Cuban territorial waters late on Sunday not far from the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay. The U.S. said it was allowing the tanker to deliver fuel for humanitarian reasons.
The Aframax tanker entered Cuba's largest fuel storage port under mostly clear skies and light winds at sunrise and appeared to prepare to approach its offloading facilities. Much of the nearby city - and the majority of Cuba - was without power at that time.
"This is like a drop of water in the desert," said Matanzas resident Marino Gálvez, 66, who watched the ship maneuvering in the bay from the city's waterfront boulevard.
"What's being done to us is very unfair, and the people shouldn't have to pay for any government's policies."
Cuba has not received an oil tanker in three months, according to President Miguel Diaz-Canel, a predicament which exacerbated an energy crisis that has brought repeated blackouts across the country of 10 million people, crippling healthcare, public transportation and farming.
The fuel, once offloaded and refined, should give Cuba's Communist-run government breathing room amid growing pressure from President Donald Trump's administration, which has promised change in Cuba.
It will take days before the crude shipment can be processed and turned into fuels.
The ship is carrying Russian Urals, a medium sour crude, which is a good fit for Cuba's aging refineries.
The U.S. cut off Venezuelan oil exports to Cuba after capturing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on January 3. Trump later threatened to slap punishing tariffs on any other country that sent crude to Cuba.
Mexico, one of the largest suppliers to Cuba, along with Venezuela, then halted its shipments.
Asked on Monday if further Russian shipments would follow, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: "In the desperate situation that Cubans now find themselves in, this, of course, cannot leave us indifferent, so we will continue to work on this."
The Trump administration said on Monday it would review further oil shipments to Cuba on a "case-by-case" basis.
(Reuters)