Russia Plans to Build Oil Refinery in Cuba

The regimes of Russia and Cuba held discussions for the construction of an oil refinery in Cuba following Russian lawmakers’ visit to the island, the Russian state news agency Tass reported on Monday.

The prospective Russian refinery, if built, would become Cuba’s fifth, joining the nation’s four other rundown refineries.

A delegation of Russian lawmakers that Duma Speaker Viacheslav Volodin led traveled to Cuba in July. During the visit, the delegation held meetings with the communist regime’s figurehead president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, and the head of the Cuban parliament, Esteban Lazo Hernández.

Volodin landed in Havana after a brief visit to Nicaragua, where he participated as a special guest in celebrations of the forty-fifth anniversary of the Sandinista revolution in which dictator Daniel Ortega made public calls for the “disappearance” of the United States.

“Bidens, they come and go. While Cuba exists and will into the future,” Volodin said in reference to U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to drop from the 2024 presidential race.

Duma Deputy Speaker Alexander Babakov, who was part of the Russian delegation, told Tass that the construction of the oil refinery was one of the subjects touched upon during the Russian lawmakers’ whirlwind visit to Havana.

“Cuba has crude oil, it is logical not to import oil products, but to produce them here,” Babakov said. “The largest Russian companies could participate here.”

“In this regard, a possible next step is deeper processing of oil products and including the creation of fertilizers,” he continued.

In recent years, the Castro regime has begun seeking an increased amount of aid from Russia, as Cuba suffers through a severe economic and humanitarian crisis — a direct consequence of more than six decades of communist rule.

Russia, a top financier of the Castro regime during the times of the Soviet Union, resumed its oil shipments to the island nation in late March after a year-long hiatus. The oil shipments seek to help Cuba ease its severe fuel shortages and run its dilapidated power plants, whose failures are causing near-endless power blackouts nationwide. Cubans are reportedly living through some of the most inhumane conditions since the 1959 communist coup.

The increase in Russian oil shipments also seeks to offset the diminishing number of heavily subsidized oil shipments that Cuba receives from the socialist regime in Venezuela, Cuba’s top oil supplier.

Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba have dropped significantly in recent years, as the collapse of socialism in Venezuela and more than two decades of socialist mismanagement greatly diminished the country’s oil output capabilities.

In recent years, the Castro regime has sought foreign investment to help it locate and drill oil offshore on its northern coast with little to no success.

Cuba presently has four run-down refineries, three of which were built by American capital entrepreneurship before Fidel Castro’s coup in the late 1950s. A fourth one, located in the province of Cienfuegos, was built in the 1980s using Soviet technology. While the Cienfuegos refinery was opened in 1991, it was closed down in 1995 after it failed to properly operate.

Venezuela’s socialist regime, under the rule of late dictator Hugo Chávez, helped its ideological mentors by funding the $83 million renovation works of the Cienfuegos refinery through a joint Cuba-Venezuela venture established in 2006. The refinery was reopened in 2007, but it has reportedly endured “ups and downs” throughout the years and required a series of repairs that concluded in November.

In 2008, Venezuela planned to have its state oil company PDVSA build a new refinery in Cuba, providing the $4.3 billion investment required. Construction works for the refinery were slated to conclude in 2015, but the collapse of Venezuela under socialism left the plans on hold.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.