Photo: Shutterstock
Text: Fede Gayardo
Venezuelan oil company PDVSA is shipping oil to Cuba using tankers that sail under the radar, according to documents and ship monitoring services maintained by the Reuters news agency.
For more than a decade, Cuba and Venezuela had used their own ships to navigate between both countries, but delays in the maintenance of some ships, among other elements, have meant that there are insufficient vessels to transport fuel to the island.
According to the report from the aforementioned agency, a large part of the fleets of Venezuela and Cuba are under US sanctions, which is why they have been referred to the so-called “dark fleet”, tankers operated by third parties that send location signals. fake to disguise their movements.
Maritime documents from the Venezuelan state company consulted by Reuters indicated that this month PDVSA began “shipping parcels of crude oil and fuel oil that it delivers partly in Cuban waters and the remaining volumes continue their route from there to destinations in Asia.”
Using the TankerTrackers.com monitoring service and satellite photography from Planet Labs, the news agency found that these vessels alter their signal, making them appear to be in other parts of the Caribbean while unloading in Cuba, often through ship-to-ship transfers. .
For example, documents and photography analyzed by TankerTrackers.com indicated that one of the tankers, the Panama-flagged Neptune 6, was last week near Nipe Bay, Cuba, transferring Venezuelan heavy crude oil and fuel oil to the Esperanza ship, with the Cuban flag.
“The ship’s transmitter has been pointing to a location north of Curacao since the end of May, according to LSEG data,” the source said.
At the moment neither PDVSA nor the ministries of Foreign Affairs of Venezuela and Cuba have commented on the matter, so it is not known if the use of said third-party ships to supply Cuba is temporary.
