Mexico and Cuba, an old friendship under the shadow of the United States

The “eat and leave” incident between Vicente Fox and Fidel Castro in March 2002 was a turning point in Mexico’s relations with Cuba. The Mexican president’s phone call, asking Castro to leave a summit of heads of state before the arrival of U.S. president George W. Bush, perfectly illustrates the dilemma that other Mexican presidents have historically faced, and which now confronts the government of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum: how to maintain good relations with both Cuba and the United States.

Sheinbaum finds herself stuck in this dichotomy, following U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to “strangle Cuba” by threatening retaliatory tariffs on countries that supply oil to the Castro regime. Mexican governments have a very particular diplomatic relationship with Cuba, shaped by historical proximity, ideological affinity, and geopolitical interest, dating back to the era of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) iron-fisted rule. Mexico, which became Cuba’s sole supplier after the United States’ intervention in Venezuela, had to suspend fuel shipments to the island two weeks ago. Since then, Sheinbaum has been searching for rhetorical solutions to navigate the fact that her decisions are dictated by Trump, who is exerting an unprecedented level of pressure.

Cuba’s ties to the PRI

The delicate geometry of that diplomatic triangle began to take shape at the 1962 summit of the Organization of American States (OAS), just three years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The United States, which wielded considerable influence in an organization aligned with its interests, pressured the other member states to expel Cuba. Mexico was the only country to vote against the measure, defending non‑intervention and the sovereignty of nations — a long‑standing Mexican diplomatic principle, forged in the aftermath of the 1910 Revolution as a mechanism of self‑protection precisely against the expansionist policies of the United States.

“Having a nationalist, revolutionary, and anti-American government in Cuba was very convenient for Mexico,” explains Lorenzo Meyer, a historian at El Colegio de México (Colmex), who points out that the ties between the two countries date back to colonial times.

The trade route between Havana and the port of Veracruz was, in fact, the very path taken by Hernán Cortés — and later retraced in reverse by Fidel Castro himself. After taking refuge in Mexico in 1955 following his failed first attempt to seize the Moncada barracks, Castro struck again the following year, setting sail for the island aboard the historic Granma with 82 men and weapons.

Cuba’s relationship with the PRI regime remained almost unchanged from the more statist governments of the early decades through the market‑oriented opening of the late 1980s. The controversial 1988 electoral victory of Carlos Salinas — denounced as fraud by his rival Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a symbol of the Mexican left — received Castro’s backing; he even attended Salinas’s inauguration in person.

According to Meyer, this paradox can be explained by mutual interest. “Cuba maintained political and commercial ties in a context of isolation, while PRI governments could showcase leftist, nationalist, and even revolutionary credentials.”

As for how this triangle fit with the U.S., Meyer adds that it was part of a kind of tacit pact, because “the United States was also interested in the PRI regime remaining in place, since it blocked any advance of communism by repressing Mexican guerrillas,” through a systematic and clandestine strategy known as the Dirty War.

A veteran PRI official who witnessed the negotiations of that era firsthand challenges the theory of this tacit agreement. “I never perceived that the decisions made regarding Cuba were mediated by the United States. They were sovereign decisions with a strong emphasis on domestic policy. There has always been a critical mass that questioned whether our support for Havana was enough.”

This complex web of interests is further complicated by the recently declassified CIA documents that confirm that Mexican governments collaborated in spying on the Cuban and Russian embassies from the late 1950s until well into the 1990s.

Vicent Fox: Breaking with Cuba

The phone call by Vicente Fox — the first president to take office after Mexico’s democratic opening and the end of nearly 80 years of PRI rule — marked the beginning of a rupture that came to a head in 2004. That year, his government withdrew ambassador Roberta Lajous from the diplomatic mission in Havana and expelled the Cuban diplomatic staff accredited in Mexico. Although there had already been moments of tension in the final years of PRI president Ernesto Zedillo, never in 102 years had Mexico–Cuba relations reached such a level of strain, and it took nearly a decade and two presidents for them to return to normal.

Rubén Aguilar, former spokesman for Vicente Fox, argues that the differences between the first National Action Party (PAN) government and Fidel Castro’s regime did not stem solely from U.S. pressure, but from the decision of the first non-PRI government to promote a human rights and democratization agenda in Cuba, first with foreign minister Jorge G. Castañeda (2000-2003) and then with his successor, Luis Ernesto Derbez (2003-2006).

In February 2002, Vicente Fox traveled to Cuba on an official four‑hour visit and, at the last minute, added a meeting with dissidents and opponents of the Castro regime — among them Oswaldo Payá — a move that caught Castro’s government by surprise. A month later came the famous episode in which — as Rubén Aguilar argues — Fox never literally uttered the phrase “eat and leave,” which immortalized the anecdote, but he did ask Castro to return to Cuba immediately after his speech at the summit and the lunch with heads of state. “Join me for the lunch and then you can go back,” is what Fox actually told Fidel, according to the recordings released from Havana in April of that same year.

During Fox’s presidency, Mexico voted in favor of resolutions critical of the Castro government at the U.N. Human Rights Commission every year from 2002 to 2005. Of these, the one that hurt Castro the most was the 2004 resolution, which passed with Mexico’s vote as the decisive one, condemning Cuba for imprisoning political dissidents and forcing it to accept a visit from a U.N. rapporteur.

Following that vote, the then Cuban foreign minister, Felipe Pérez Roque, declared that Mexico had joined “the United States’ policy of blockade and aggression against Cuba.” Fidel Castro himself escalated the rhetoric in a May 1, 2004, speech, stating: “The U.S.-Mexican border is to all practical purposes no longer the Rio Bravo [...] The United States has gone much deeper into Mexico.”

In those months, beyond the rhetoric, Castro’s government used the case of businessman Carlos Ahumada — detained in Cuba — to claim that the Fox administration was weaponizing the justice system to discredit its opponents, specifically the then‑mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had been caught up in a scandal known as the “the video scandals,” orchestrated by Ahumada and politicians from both the PAN and the PRI.

Two decades after those events, Rubén Aguilar says: “Jorge Castañeda convinced Fox that we had to establish a relationship with Cuba, but not with the Cuban Revolution, which violates human rights. It was important to change the terms of the relationship, moving away from that mutually beneficial relationship between Cuba and the PRI, where both justified human rights violations. And so we voted in favor of the presence of a rapporteur.”

The stance of Felipe Calderón — the second president to be elected from PAN — embodies how difficult it is for Mexico to maintain, on the one hand, a foreign policy that balances its obligatory relationship with the United States and, on the other, the symbolic and historically warm ties with the Cuban regime. In his book Decisiones difíciles (Difficult Decisions), Calderón recounts what he had to do to repair the relationship that Fox had damaged — both with Cuba and with the United States.

“The relationship with the antipodes, the United States and Cuba, was complex,” he writes. “Generally, Mexico oscillates between the two countries and on more than one occasion has acted as a mediator. But it so happens that being very close to one leads to enmity or at least diplomatic distance with the other.”

He continues: “When we took office, we were at odds with both: on the one hand, president Bush didn’t hide his displeasure with my predecessor... who had never given him a definitive answer regarding the support requested from Mexico in the United Nations resolutions concerning Iraq. On the Cuban side, the shame of the Mexican president’s humiliation at the hands of Fidel Castro still lingered, as he had been naive — poorly advised by his foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda — to discuss such a delicate matter as asking him to leave after the luncheon with heads of state so as not to coincide with Bush’s arrival.”

Reconciliation

Under Calderón, Mexico restored its relationship with Cuba. Following the 2006 election — a race decided by less than one percentage point and followed by allegations of irregularities — Caldéron was under pressure and facing widespread public opposition. He changed his stance on Cuba at the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and in July 2007, he appointed as ambassador the veteran PAN member Gabriel Jiménez Remus, who avoided further friction with the leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

The Calderón administration maintained relations with Cuban dissidents, demanded the release of political prisoners, and opened the borders to hundreds of exiles. Even so, Calderón maintained good relations with the regime: he participated in the first Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), held in Venezuela in 2011, and signed the Caracas Declaration condemning the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

In April 2012, Calderón traveled to Cuba on an official visit, a few months before leaving office. Former PAN officials admit that the fact that the last four years of his term coincided with the Obama administration — which had begun a policy of rapprochement with the island — worked in his favor.

When the PRI returned to power in 2012, with Enrique Peña Nieto as president, Mexico and Cuba completed the process of normalizing relations. Peña Nieto traveled to Cuba in January 2014 to participate in the CELAC summit and visit Fidel Castro, who agreed to have a photograph of their private meeting released. In 2015, then-Cuban president Raúl Castro visited Mexico, and in November 2016, Peña Nieto attended Fidel’s funeral in Havana. That visit took place just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States for the first time and once again increased pressure on Havana.

Starting in 2018, it fell to López Obrador to maintain that fragile balance — now with Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel Raúl Castro’s successor and Donald Trump in his first term. With the renegotiation of the USMCA as the top priority in Mexico–U.S. relations, and the COVID-19 pandemic as the backdrop, frictions over Cuba did not surface during the Trump administration.

But in June 2022, under U.S. president Joe Biden, the Mexican government rejected the U.S. decision to exclude Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from the Summit of the Americas; then-Mexican president López Obrador canceled his participation and sent foreign minister Marcelo Ebrard in his place.

A few months earlier, López Obrador had made an official visit to Cuba, where he once again condemned the U.S. embargo, strengthened cooperation ties, and agreed to hire Cuban doctors for Mexico’s public health services.

Sheinbaum is now working to preserve this long‑standing relationship with Havana in the midst of a politically difficult storm

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