A tanker leaves the shipyard in Mexico and is going to load Pemex oil for Cuba
HAVANA, Nov. 11. The Esperanza petrochemical ship, sanctioned by the US and owned by the Cuban military business conglomerate, GAESAIt left the shipyard in Veracruz, Mexico, where it had been undergoing repairs for months, and headed to the nearby oil terminal of the state-owned Pemex in Pajaritos, to presumably load fuel for the island.
“The Esperanza is now at the Coatzacoalcos/Pajaritos anchorage waiting to enter the Pemex terminal,” warned Jorge Piñón, principal researcher at the University of Texas Energy Institute.
According to the specialist, the Delsa, also from GAESA, but not included in the sanctioned list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the US Department of the Treasury, was in that location during the past few days. , loading oil.
This editorial confirmed the location in Pajaritos del Esperanza, through the Marine Traffic tracking site. For its part, the Delsa left this Friday for Cuba, indicating the ship monitoring platform itself.
In the middle of the year, Havana began using its own ships to increase shipments from Mexico. A U.S. State Department spokesperson told Reuters in April that Washington was “aware that Cuba buys oil from several countries, both sanctioned and non-sanctioned.”
According to figures from the Bank of Mexico, crude oil exports from Mexico to Cuba in September amounted to 286 million dollars, up from 262 million in August and 234 in July.
The above, despite the fact that this week the Government of Mexico assured that “it has no commercial relationship” in the energy sector with Cuba. The Mexican Undersecretary of Foreign Trade, Alejandro Encinas Nájera, said in Havana that, therefore, “there would be reasons” for companies like Pemex to be sanctioned by the US for negotiating with the Island.
“Mexico is a sovereign country that has to diversify its trade relations,” said the undersecretary, quoted by EFE.
On October 16, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador denied that there were adverse reactions from Washington for the sale of Pemex crude oil to Cuba, while Octavio Romero Oropeza, president of Pemex, denied that the oil company, the most indebted in the world, will donate crude oil to Cuba, as was commented in September by the Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Alicia Bárcena.
On the other hand, the United States Export and Import Bank (EXIM) denied in October that it had canceled financing to Pemex for sending oil to the Island, as Bloomberg reported.
“We are going to do everything we can help the people of Cuba, so that they no longer have any doubts, including oil, because they are a people that is suffering from an inhuman, unjust blockade, and we cannot turn our backs on it.” people of Cuba,” López Obrador declared in mid-October.
