Looting of oil tanker in La Lisa occurs in front of police in Havana
Dozens of people attacked a truck loaded with cooking oil in Havana this Friday, despite police presence. The incident reflects the food crisis gripping Cuba in 2026.
Crowd loots oil truck in Havana as police stand by
Dozens of people attacked a truck loaded with cooking oil on Friday in the vicinity of La Lisa Cemetery and the National Motorway in Havana. The incident was captured on video and shared on Facebook by journalist Gilberto Dorrego, according to cibercuba.com.
A witness present at the scene indicated that the vehicle was being guarded by police officers when what Dorrego himself described as an "avalanche of people" descended on the truck to seize the oil. Police presence failed—or did not attempt—to stop the looting, the same source asserted.
Chronic shortages and prices beyond reach
The incident occurs in the context of an acute shortage of cooking oil that has extended throughout 2026. The Minister of the Food Industry, Alberto López Díaz, acknowledged in June that the rationing booklet had not distributed oil, chicken or yoghurt in the year so far.
The situation worsened following the entry into force of Resolution 150/2026 from the Ministry of Finance and Prices, which eliminated price caps for imported edible oils and repealed the previous limit of 990 pesos per litre. As a result, the product price climbed from around 1,500 pesos per litre in April to between 4,000 and 7,000 pesos in different provinces by August—figures unaffordable for those earning Cuban pesos.
Faced with the inability to buy oil, many families have resorted to pork fat or coconut as substitutes, although those products too began to run short. There are mothers cooking eggs in water for lack of oil, an image that captures the scale of the food collapse.
History of similar looting incidents
The La Lisa episode is not the first of its kind. In August 2025, a traffic accident in Bayamo led to a similar case of collective appropriation of goods, with subsequent arrests. In October of that same year an attempted looting of a moving truck was reported in Camagüey. In February 2025, Cuban police were filmed extorting a driver of an agricultural truck in El Cerro, in Havana, demanding part of the cargo.
Five Cuban provinces were registering critical levels of food insecurity in April 2026, according to a report cited at that time, and the situation has only deteriorated since then.
That agents were unable—or unwilling—to contain the crowd this Friday in La Lisa underscores something more than the shortage of a product: the erosion of state authority in the face of basic needs that it has been unable to meet for years.
Source: Google News CU — La Habana