In Cuba, austerity is threatening to make an unwanted comeback. The island's government is planning for an immediate future of budget cutbacks with little chance of financial relief. At the root of Cuba's slide into austerity is the Venezuelan economic crisis. Cuba receives around 55,000 barrels per day of mostly crude oil from Venezuela — down from more than 100,000 barrels per day only five years ago — as well as an unknown amount of financial assistance. The decline in Venezuelan energy shipments has forced the Cuban government to seek to diversify its import sources and to cut back on imports of higher-grade gasoline and diesel. In this sense, Cuba's new austerity is a far cry from the "special period" of the early 1990s, when its primary source of foreign assistance and trade, the Soviet Union, disintegrated and the Cuban government's income declined precipitously.