Enter Cuba market with a .CU Domain

As a company yes, as an individual no. The rules list who may apply in a single sentence: Cuban and foreign legal persons and natural persons resident in the country. A company established abroad can therefore register .cu directly, and the registry also treats foreign legal persons as eligible under com.cu. For natural persons, however, residence in Cuba is required, and that condition closes the door on individuals living abroad. A name is allocated to the first applicant who meets the conditions.

Name choice is not free, and this is the strictest rule of the extension. For legal persons the name must rest either on a trademark registered in the applicant's favour with the Cuban Industrial Property Office, or on the applicant's own name, acronym, initials or legally recognised alias. There is also a prohibition list: generic, common or customary terms, geographic names and demonyms, names identical or deceptively similar to the country's name, top-level domains and Internet terminology, another person's name, and strings made up solely of digits are not granted.

You may well have to. The rules give the registry an explicit power: in order to verify that a name does not breach the rules, it may ask the applicant for supporting documents. For legal persons those may include an Industrial Property Office trademark record, a commercial register or institutional units register certificate, or a serial publications or associations register entry; for names that fit none of these, the registry relies on a conflict check from the trademark office. The application page counts documents as one of four steps: choose the name, complete the form, submit the required documents, pay the fee.

For one year. The rules put it in a single sentence: the allocation of a domain name is valid for one year and may be renewed consecutively for equal periods. The registry applies two types of fee and each covers a twelve-month period counted from the month recorded as the allocation date: an allocation fee for a new name and a renewal fee to extend an existing one by a year. Multi-year registration is not provided for. Renewal is conditional on continued compliance with the rules.

Within thirty days yes, after that no. The calendar works like this: the registry may send a renewal notice up to thirty days before expiry, but this is at its discretion rather than an obligation; you, by contrast, must declare your intention to pay at least fifteen days in advance. If payment has not been made fifteen days after expiry the name is suspended and stops resolving; thirty days after expiry it is revoked and released to third parties. During suspension nobody else can take the name, which makes those thirty days a genuine recovery window.

A change of holder is possible and the procedure is written into the rules. The transfer request is submitted to the registry by the administrative contact; the document must fully identify the current holder, include the password of the name being transferred, state the intention and the conditions of the transfer explicitly, and set out the details of the new holder. The recipient must meet the applicant conditions, complete the allocation form with a new password and pay the renewal fee on time, failing which the transfer is not carried out. Start on the domain transfer page.

Partly. The rules enumerate the valid characters: the letters a-z, the digits 0-9, the hyphen and the letters á é í ó ú ü ñ; names using that last group are expressly called internationalised domain names in the text. Characters outside Spanish, such as the Turkish ı, ğ and ş, are not on the list. A name may not begin or end with a hyphen and may not contain two consecutive hyphens; length runs from three to sixty-three characters and the registry recommends at least five. Accented and unaccented spellings count as the same name for availability.

Only with your consent. The rules oblige the registry to maintain a web information service publishing the rules, the tariffs and the list of allocated domain names — including the data of holders and their contacts — but the same sentence conditions this on «their prior consent». Privacy is therefore not a separate paid service; publication is what requires permission. The registry has no WHOIS server on port 43; queries are made through its own web interface, which shows names already allocated as well as applications still being processed.

Not on its own. According to information published by the registry, Resolution 93/2003 of the Ministry of Communications states that all Cuban websites on a .cu domain must be located on servers in Cuba, regardless of also being hosted on servers outside the country. Hosting abroad is therefore not forbidden, but a server presence inside Cuba is mandatory. This is not a technical footnote: it is a cost item that shapes the purchase decision and should be planned for before you register the name.

The route is national and monolingual. The rules state that where circumstances lead to a disagreement, the matter is heard before Cuban mediation and arbitration bodies or through the courts in the national territory, that Cuban law applies and that the language used is Spanish. Any natural or legal person who considers their rights harmed may request revocation of the name. The process starts on the date the registry is formally notified, and from that moment transfers as well as contact and DNS changes are blocked. A court or arbitration decision is executed immediately.