When I was in Germany in 2000, a Cuban cigar was going for $25 each equivalent at that time..............
There was a “golden age” of relatively inexpensive Cuban cigars (the entire catalog) that could be ordered over the Internet by mail (from Europe) up until late 2021 and delivered to the US.
This was because many of the smaller European countries were given quotas of Cuban cigars higher than they could sell at the retail level. Those retailers signed agreements with the Cuban cigar distributor promising they would not resell the cigars to other retailers. They lied—and sold their overstock to “other companies” on a routine basis.
Those “other companies” (a “gray market”) were created (based either in Switzerland or Eastern European countries) that ended up with huge warehouses full of Cuban cigars and shipped them to the US and around the world.
They were called “grey market” because it was legal for them to buy and sell Cuban cigars. What was “grey” was their suppliers violating their agreements with their distributors and selling cigars to places like the US where Cubans were illegal.
These “other companies” competed with each other on price and had excellent deals on a routine basis—often easily beating regulated Spanish prices (which are published on the Internet btw).
Nowadays it is much more expensive and difficult for Americans to buy Cuban cigars by mail—U.S. Customs enforcement has gotten much tighter.
In the good old days when I ordered Cubans I never had a box seized and I ordered a lifetime supply.
The boxes have labeling on them in more than a dozen different European languages—depending on which country the original “overstock” came from. The majority were from Eastern Europe.
Today there is better than a 50% chance than a given box will be seized by customs—and those large “other companies” are refusing to ship to the US for that reason.