Ebay Doesn't Sell Cuban Coinage?

ebay does not allow them to be listed with the word "Cuba." After the last President reinstated the ban on anything Cuban, any listings that had been sneaking through disappeared.

If you look for certain things you can find them listed, e.g. doing a search for "1952" and "Centavos" under World Coins might locate a few.

There was a seller for awhile who was listing them as something like "caribbean island 20 centavos", etc. I also saw "Cube-uh" a couple of times.

It's not ebay's choice, it's Federal law.

Now, how ebay chooses to implement the ban is of course their choice.

They could do it by having knowledgable individuals review every listing.

Or they could use automated scanning. More accurate but much more expensive.

Which do you think they picked?

Seems as though the actual word "Cuba" must be censored. I did find that the Cuban collectibles doesn't mention the word for its coins for sale. Another Numismatic company is selling them as Caribbean.

Geeze, the US Govt is pretty butt hurt that is couldn't manage to change the power structure in Cuba.

Yes, they block the word from listings and will not allow you to create the listing with Cuba in the title. I don't recall anyone here stating that it was ebay's choice to do so. They have to follow the law like every other business.

Yes, ebay's blocking of the use of the word "Cuba" in sale listings doesn't make much sense, on several levels.

Saying "they're just obeying American law" is not correct. The laws in place prohibit the current Cuban regime from profiting off sales of current Cuban goods to Americans by blocking all American exports to or imports from Cuba. There's nothing in US law to prevent people buying and selling pre-Castro artifacts that are not actually shipped from Cuba. Go into just about any brick-and-mortar coin dealer in the country and they will happily and legally trade in Cuban coins with you. But the vast majority of attempted sales of Cuban coins are by American sellers, and a large proportion of these coins are American-minted coins made for the pro-US pre-Castro regime, which surely the US would want to encourage and foster the memory of. As far as these coins are concerned, the primary target being hurt by ebay's regulations are loyal Americans, not Cubans or Cuban sympathizers.

The US is the only country to have diplomatic problems with Cuba; nobody else has a problem with them. But ebay blocks the entire planet from mentioning the word "Cuba". So ebay Canada, or ebay Australia, or the European ebay sites, also suffer from the ban, even if the seller refuses to ship to the US.

Yet, we're stuck with it. ebay's house, ebay's rules.

ebay has a long history of avoiding or restricting the sale of politically sensitive items in listings, whether legally "banned" or not. This applies to coins from embargoed countries as well.

When I sold a large single-individual collection of German Third Reich war medals in 2003, I was required to remove any references to "Nazi" and was also required to cover any visible swastikas in the photos with a black box. Additional complications arose when several winning bidders for various items ended up being located outside of the USA, and I found out that shipping the medals to those countries was restricted as well and had to refund and relist a few pieces. (It was still worth the hassle - the most expensive item, a Spanish Cross in silver with swords with matching stick pin and original presentation case, sold for over $900, and the sale as a whole financed a good part of our wedding and also our honeymoon in Vegas for a week.)

I think in a lot of cases ebay does not want to risk censure or fines for allowing items from embargoed countries to be listed or sold, even if those items have provenance that verifies they were legally imported prior to the embargo. Since most sellers cannot prove that the items were legally obtained, it's easier for ebay to just ban them entirely.

The government does take these embargoes very seriously. In the late 1990s I worked for a small computer company that built, repaired and sold new PC's and laptops. The owner was Iranian and in the warehouse there were often computer parts and computers being shipped to customers in Iran (a big no-no, I found out later.) I quit to go back to school full time; less than a year later they were raided, the owner was arrested, and most of the inventory was confiscated; the business was permanently closed down. They had just opened up a new store a few months prior, and it was raided and shut down too. I'm glad I was no longer working there!

And designed by Charles Barber!