It's very annoying. I worked at a shop that sold cigars online. No actual cubans, but brands that used the name cuba in it. Inadvertently every time it would get flagged.
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This seems like poor branding on the part of the cigar brands (at least for online sales).
When Castro took over the owners of the brands fled and took the rights to the brands with them. At the same time the Cuban government kept making the cigars under the same name. So for every major brand you will find 2 in the world, one Cuban, one not.
Bacardi (Puerto Rico) has started copying the Cuban Havana Club rum as well.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/havana-club-v-havana...
Well there's legal arguments to be had here about ip.
One of the Bacardi family was locked up / exiled during the first Cuban revolution ironically.
And the non-Cuban ones are laughably awful. The unexpected benefit of the embargo is it forced them to maintain a super premium product. They've had some anecdotal quality issues since Castro died, but being shielded from US markets and globalization made for better products in that case.
I am not sure what you are talking about but some of the best cigars in the world are not Cuban. Just look at CA top 25 list over the last 10 years. The H. Upmann (non Cuban) 175th Anniversary is an amazing stick. Cuban cigars have a unique flavor profile and can be amazing but they have not evolved at all. Also they have had some major quality issues. If I go into any store in London to by a box I am allowed to inspect each stick and build a box of good quality ones from a set of boxes. To be fair, the quality issues have gotten better in the last few years.
If I'm buying Cuban singles, I get it cut in the shop at the counter and check the draw to see if it's plugged. There are great non-Cubans, just not the fake brand ones, imo. The Avo Domaine is one of my all time favourites, and any Ashton maduro is my go-to when I'm stateside. I haven't had a Davidoff that I remembered well enough to get another of, and for that price, it should have been more memorable. It's a very individual thing. Given how recklessly dangerous it is to smoke anything at all, I keep it to a few high end ones as an occasional treat, as if I'm going to be giving myself cancer, it had better be the fancy cancer.
Is "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" a bad brand for margarine? Imagine it getting flagged by the butter police.
The difference is that there are no butter police, while there are in fact Cuban embargo police that will cause much greater difficulties in selling anything with the word "Cuban" in it.
So, no, "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!" is not a bad brand for margarine, but saying "Cuban" something in a cigar which causes all manner of embargo difficulties is bad branding.
Well, they have managed to generate a class-action lawsuit, although it's more over the zero-calorie claim:
https://dev.theclassactionguide.com/News/3029/I_Can%E2%80%99...