Has Cuba Stopped Issuing Stamps Altogether?

Within collecting, ebay & PayPal's wrongly-implemented bans on selling stamps from Cuba, along with Iran, Sudan, etc., really put a damper on the willingness to collect those areas, even vintage issues from those countries.

As far as I know, congress still has an embargo on the Cuban items, so ebay and PayPal are simply following that.

Items COMING IN from those countries yes, but ebay and PayPal have put blanket prohibitions on ANYTHING originating from those countries, even if they have been within the U.S. for decades.

The intent is to prevent newly-manufactured goods from those countries from entering the country. Vintage stamps/coins/currency/collectibles do not factor into the intent of this prohibition at all.

Realizing that eBay/PayPal do not have the manpower to closely scrutinize these issues, a cutoff date, e.g., "goods manufactured before 20xx or 19xx" are not impacted" would make the most logical sense.

They would still have to scrutinize every item to insure that they actually come from before the cutoff date. Since stamps are a VERY low priority to ebay, they just decided to ban everything and make it easy on themselves. Not really surprising, there isn't enough money involved for them to want to deal with it. Same with PayPal, not enough money involved for them to care what collectors might think. As always, the bottom line is the bottom line.

That, only, may hold for US ebay users. On the Dutch ebay website, I can order Cuban stamps. The sellers are outside Cuba as far as I have seen. But I get 802 hits for "Cuba postzegels." So, I have not checked whether there is absolutely no Cuban seller. Even if there is not, I would not be able to tell whether there are no sellers, or whether they are banned.

Using ebay.com, I get 830 hits for "Cuba stamps."

Using ebay.es, "Cuba sellos" returns there are more than 1,700 hits.

Yes, this is strictly a U.S. import ban. It does not apply to platforms in other countries.

So, it would not end demand from Spain (former colony and immigrants) and those European people (on both sides of the iron curtain) who still mourn the downfall of the big socialist workers' paradise and collect all that represented those paradises.

No. The Kennedy embargo applies to ebay etc overseas because subsidiaries of US entities are covered. I can't list Cuban stamps on ebay uk.

Edit - or should I say that ebay did block Cuban stamps,, but some now appear on ebay uk. Don't know when the practice changed.

Interesting. I always assumed that the fact that there were any listings for "Cuba" stamps anywhere was because there was no enforcement outside of the U.S., and that it was international listings that were making their way through to U.S. users.

If that's not the case, then why are there any Cuba listings at all? Their bots auto-delist anything that matches Cuba (assuming the item makes it's way through the listing process) at least here in the U.S.. Does enforcement vary by country?

Cuban products have been available here as long as I can remember. You can buy good Cuban cigars, at least on the continent. We were not stuck with Bacardi but could buy Havana Club imported from Cuba.

I do not know if ebay enforced the embargo, but I have read that ebay would not allow listings for five years now. I never saw any evidence of that. Each time this has been claimed, I have seen Cuban stamps listed on ebay.

German ebay lists Cuban stamps.

Of course there is politics behind stamp design—Cuba provides obvious examples, but the same is true in the United States. Even U.S. stamps carry political weight. Take the 1923–25 definitives: they were issued to feature Republican presidents—Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft, and Warren G. Harding. It would not be unreasonable to call this series the "Republican Commemorative Issue."

What I find problematic, though, are unsupported assertions. For example, this forum would never accept a post that said, "Interesting that some irregular perforations in modern U.S. stamps show that the Post Office is printing its stamps in China," without evidence. We should hold political commentary to the same evidentiary standard.

ALL US stamps carry political weight of some kind. Almost all stamps of every country carry political weight of some kind. Even those specifically created to sell to topical collectors say something about the country that issues them. Even if it's just "We want your money". Obviously some issues and some countries can be more political than others, depending of course on the point of view of the observer/collector. That's why all who have been collectors for any real length of time are likely to have stamps they really like and stamps they really dislike for a variety of reasons (but often political).

Like what?