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Every article, newest first. Herrera on Cigar LawTM has been published since 2009, and its earlier editions remain online in their own archives.
The Ninth Circuit let California make cigar companies prove their products are unflavored. The industry lost the injunction, but it won something on the record that may matter more, and the opinion now sets the rules for flavor lists across nine western states.
We scored all 50 states and the District of Columbia on the state laws that matter most to a premium cigar: tax, indoor smoking, flavor bans, shipping and local power. Maine leads, the Southeast trails, and taxes explain most of the gap.
IEEPA duties ended, a balance-of-payments surcharge came and went, and a forced labor tariff now sits on almost every premium cigar entering the United States. Here is how the pieces fit, and what an importer should be checking now.
Ten years after the deeming rule, a federal court has settled the definition that decides which cigars FDA regulates. The exemption is real, but it rests on a court order rather than a statute, and that should shape what every manufacturer does next.
For more than two decades, Title III of the Helms-Burton Act sat suspended. In 2026, the Supreme Court read it broadly twice in five weeks. A cigar heritage case shows both the reach of the statute and its most important limit.
Cubaexport defeated Bacardi's Havana Club appeal in June, then lost the registration in August when no acceptable maintenance filing was made. With COHIBA argued in September, the two cases now frame how Cuban marks live and die in U.S. law.
The Cuban state's partner in Habanos S.A. traces back, according to reporting, to a businessman the U.S. Treasury designated in October 2025. The fallout has reached factories in the Dominican Republic and Honduras and distributors in Europe, and it shows how ownership sanctions travel.
OFAC tightened the Cuban Assets Control Regulations and created a second Cuba sanctions program on the same day. The headlines are about banks and travel. For cigar companies, the more interesting story is what was left alone.
Brussels has proposed raising the EU's minimum excise on cigars many times over, a compromise text has already cut the number, and a rewrite of the Tobacco Products Directive is next. Exporters to Europe should be planning for 2028 now.
The Federal Circuit has held that a vaporizer mark shaped like an X with a dot does not conflict with Fuente's X marks for cigars, even though the goods travel in the same channels. The lessons are about perception, proof and how a single letter is protected.
FDA's flavored cigar ban is gone, but flavor rules have not disappeared. They have moved to the states, where California and Massachusetts treat premium cigars very differently and tax increases are arriving one legislature at a time.
Illinois and Louisiana added per-cigar caps, Maine nearly doubled its rate with no cap at all, and two states now require out-of-state sellers to license and collect. State tax law is moving faster than it has in years, and in both directions.
Beyond taxes, 2026 brought a new cigar bar law in South Dakota, vetoes in Wisconsin and Alaska, a generational sales ban bill in New York, local flavor bans upheld in Oregon and California's unflavored list in full force. Each one changes where and to whom a premium cigar can be sold.
First published in 2009, the blog went quiet in 2018. The law did not. Here is why it is back, what it will cover and the new tools built to keep readers current between articles.
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