US And Cuba Agree To Restore Direct Mail Service

It's been 52 years since there was direct mail service between the US and Cuba:

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/co...ntcmp=hplnws

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Yea! Now if ebay will allow sales of Cuban stamps and covers.

Battle, that would be too sensible.

It's not ebay, but rather the US government which still hasn't lifted the trade embargo between the two countries. This embargo has been in effect since the 1960's

The United Nations conducts an annual vote to lift the embargo, but the US has always fought to keep it in place. It is rumored that the US will abstain during the next vote, but this will cause a conflict between the UN and the US Congress, which still wants the embargo. So who knows how many more years this will continue.

I don't think any embargo has lasted this long - just imagine this one was put in place when Kennedy was in the White House!

Jenny2U: Except that ebay blocks even items that are pre-embargo or completely exempt from the embargo. There was a recent ad in the APS magazine from Mystic about now selling modern Cuban stamps, but CTO stamps only.

Jenny, ebay is much of the problem. https://goscf.com/t/31858

ebay does not hire people to sit around and review listings; they get thousands submitted per minute. They use key word text filtering which is notoriously expensive (expensive = consumes server performance). So they do not form complex filters and instead end up with a lot of 'false positives'.
Their simple objective is to be able to say, "we gave our best effort to meet or exceed the requirement of any trade embargo laws". This keeps their lawyer and stockholders happy that they aren't taking any legal risks. They don't care if people work around it by avoiding the key words. they don't care if they are missing out of any listing or commission fees.
Don

As we all know, ebay has no desire (or know-how) to determine what is pre-embargo, post-embargo or pseudo-embargo, so they take the easy way out and ban everything. Only once the embargo is lifted by the US Congress will ebay change its policy.

Strange, isn't it, that the U.S. allows exports to Cuba.