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Cuban Nickel & Cobalt — Geography, History and the Market
Why the Moa laterites matter, how the trade works, and where US law bites.
Cuba sits on one of the world's great nickel-and-cobalt endowments, concentrated in the red laterite soils of the northeast around Moa and Nicaro. This is a factual, non-commercial explainer of how that industry works — the geology, the history, the joint venture that runs it today, and the way the US embargo has shaped where Cuban nickel can and cannot be sold. It quotes no prices and brokers nothing; it explains the sector and points to where it sits on the CubaAtlas map and economy pages.
The basics
Laterite country
Cuba's nickel-cobalt resources sit in weathered, iron-rich laterite deposits in Holguín province — principally Moa, Nicaro and Mayarí (USGS).
A cobalt heavyweight
Per the USGS 2024 assessment Cuba ranks about fourth in the world in cobalt reserves (~500,000 t) and among the top handful of cobalt producers.
Sold everywhere but the US
Because of the embargo, the Moa joint venture's nickel and cobalt are marketed worldwide 'except in the United States' (Sherritt).
How it really works
The Moa laterites
The northeast of Cuba, around Moa in Holguín province, is a belt of lateritic ore — soils weathered from iron- and nickel-rich rock — that holds one of the most significant nickel-cobalt concentrations on earth. The 2019 Moa technical report cited measured tonnage of about 111.9 million tonnes at roughly 1.03% nickel and 0.13% cobalt (Sherritt). Cobalt here is recovered as a by-product of nickel, and the relatively high cobalt grades are part of what makes the deposits strategically interesting as battery demand grows.
Nicaro, and a wartime start
The island's first nickel plant was built by a United States company at Nicaro, in the Mayarí municipality of Holguín, in 1943 to feed wartime demand; that facility ran until 2012 (Britannica; Ahora). Nickel has been part of the region's economy for the better part of a century, and its towns grew up around the works — which is why the pre-1959 industrial map and the modern economy layer both trace the same ground.
Freeport, expropriation, and the joint venture
The Moa processing plant — the 'Comandante Pedro Sotto Alba' — was expropriated by the Cuban government in 1960 from the US firm Freeport Sulphur (Sherritt). Since 1994 it has been run as Moa Nickel S.A., a 50:50 joint venture between Canada's Sherritt International and Cuba's state-owned General Nickel Company (Sherritt). It is one of the longest-running foreign industrial partnerships on the island.
How the metal actually moves
At Moa, open-pit lateritic ore is processed into a mixed sulphide precipitate carrying nickel and cobalt, which is then shipped across the Atlantic to the joint venture's refinery at Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, in Canada — a refinery with roughly 38,200 tonnes a year of combined nickel-plus-cobalt capacity (Sherritt). Contained output has run in the low-to-mid ten-thousands of tonnes of nickel-plus-cobalt a year, with an expansion under way.
The embargo, and the 'nickel rule'
US law has shadowed Cuban nickel for decades. Under the Cuban Assets Control Regulations the US Treasury historically barred entry of any product made wholly or partly from Cuban-origin material even when it arrived from a third country — an early, much-cited extraterritorial reach of the embargo often described in terms of Cuban nickel and sugar. In practice the Moa venture simply sells outside the United States. For any US-connected reader this is the threshold fact, not a footnote.
US law applies — read this first
US persons should note that the Cuban Assets Control Regulations (31 CFR Part 515) broadly restrict dealings connected to Cuban-origin goods, and the embargo's historical 'nickel rule' extended that reach to products containing Cuban nickel even via third countries. This page is information, not legal or investment advice — verify current OFAC guidance before any decision.
Where this leads on CubaAtlas
The useful next steps — the lawful ones.