There are global trade and sanction contracts between USA and eu fyi and the financial sector is even more strongly regulated.
(As a Canadian I've been to Cuba many times with no issues; however a friend's father worked for a nickel mining company and spent time there overseeing their operations in Cuba and he can no longer travel to the US among other things.)
The question is a) "why is Cuba singled out over places like China that do similar (and often worse) shitty things?" b) "why are we ignoring decades of failure of the embargo to induce any meaningful change?"
I think Obama at least sensed that the best way to get Cuba into a more functional state and better neighbour was to take the "but we're embargoed!" excuse away from the regime there. Trump undid that.
BTW the only time I came across sex tourism in Cuba, it was indeed a creepy guy with two young (probably minor) girls. In a cafe in Havana. But the guy was not Canadian, he was American. And repulsive.
What seems more likely to me is, a request came from my app to some bank server. The server detected the request coming from Cuba and flagged the account as having suspicious activity, that in turn triggering an automated message.
Maybe there was indeed a guy somewhere in an office who saw one request to my account coming from Cuba and decided to have some fun and said he’ll turn my account off. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s creepy it happened.
I am a EU citizen. I only have EU bank accounts. The app I used was of a EU bank. There are no EU sanctions against Cuba at this time or at the time I was there. I also have no relation to the USA, I was never there or have business there.
A few days after opening my bank app ( again, read only, no transaction ) I received a threatening email from my EU bank saying I might be in violation of sanctions and it is prohibited to use the bank in a list of jurisdictions ( basically the ones mentioned in the post minus the last thee ) and the bank reserves the right to terminate my account.
As you can imagine, this was very concerning. Fortunately nothing came of it.
But still, I find it ridiculous the bank threatened to close my account just for being in a country that, at least for the jurisdictions that concern me, is a normal country.
I have no doubt this was an automated message. The only thing that prevented my bank account from being terminated was the suspicious activity flag triggered the email handler and not the delete account handler.
I find this to be utterly dystopian.