Updates with additional details from gas price announcement, context, quotes

By Dave Sherwood

HAVANA, May 12 (Reuters) - Cuba will announce new, variable fuel prices at the pump from May 15 to better reflect the "actual" costs of importing gas and diesel amid an ongoing U.S. fuel blockade, the Ministry of Finance and Prices said on Tuesday.

The announcement follows two straight weeks in which fuel has all but disappeared from state-run gas stations in the capital Havana as the U.S. blockade has largely strangled supply and led to strict rationing.

The shortages have forced most Cubans to park the few remaining gas-powered vehicles, four months after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on any nation exporting fuel to Cuba, effectively laying siege to Havana.

Cuba's government said some avenues for importing fuel still exist despite the Trump measures but new prices would vary depending on the supplier, shipping costs, routes, insurance, related risks and fluctuations on the international markets.

Prices will be posted publicly and could vary from gas station to gas station, the statement said.

"The gradual process of social and economic transformations that Cuba has been carrying out ... has allowed multiple actors to be able to import and market fuels in foreign currency."

Cuba's government in February announced measures that allowed private actors to import fuel independently of the state.

But the Ministry of Finance and Prices did not specify who was importing the fuel, nor how it was arriving in Cuba.

Neither Mexico nor Venezuela, once top suppliers of oil to Cuba, have sent fuel to the island since Trump's January 2026 executive order imposing the blockade.

U.S. suppliers, as of late March, had shipped more than 30,000 barrels of fuel in container ships to the island's private businesses, Reuters reported exclusively, under an exception carved out by the U.S. aimed at giving private enterprise an advantage over Cuba's communist-run state sector.

But that fuel is strictly earmarked for use by private business, according to the U.S. State Department.

The price for a liter of premium gasoline had previously been set at $1.30, while a liter of diesel was sold at $1.10. Both have been available only in small and strictly rationed quantities since January.

Black market prices, meanwhile, have soared to between $8 and $10 a liter for gasoline, far out of reach of most Cubans and many times above global market levels.

The United Nations last week called Trump's fuel blockade unlawful, saying it had obstructed "Cuban people’s right to development while undermining their rights to food, education, health, and water and sanitation."