Sadly, they’re not all created equal. I went through a few bags of having to pry them apart AFTER soaking before I gave up and went to pellets. I just couldn’t get the nice flaky ones that fell apart in 10 - 20 minutes anymore* 
At least I feed them just for nutrition and supplement carrier as my horse has 24/7 access to hay/pasture.
*I think there was a problem with customer service with the premium brand and it disappeared for a while.
I have had only one case of choke in my 50 plus years as a horsewoman …my mare choked on a wisp of alfalfa hay. It never happened again.
A horse can conceivably choke on anything.
I don’t personally use cubes, but the ones some friends get from our Southern States are really hard and take hours, as well as other friends from all over having various sources that are just bricks. Not all, for sure, some can even be broken up by hand, but lots of them are really hard
I have an older guy with worn teeth that has 24/7 access to grass, but can’t chew anything long stemmed, including hay, very well. Short little leaves of new growth are fine though. So I supplement his roughage intake with soaked alfalfa cubes. I have found they fall apart faster when using hot water rather than cold, and different brands (Standlee, Dumor) can take longer and seem harder and coarser than the brand I am using now, Top of the Rockies - which are just higher quality all the way around. They are also easier to break apart into the thin little “wafers”, which I like to feed as treats!
I dont know what cubes are like elsewhere but I can’t imagine feeding ours dry. They are crazy hard.
Weird, I’ve never experienced such hard cubes. I’ve never used Southern States, though, but have used half a dozen other brands in both Ohio and Florida.
I wonder if there’s a correlation to area - are the people getting rock-hard cubes in less-horsey areas, so maybe the cubes are sitting in the store for longer?
Nope, we are in a horsey area and the cubes are fresh. Noone here uses cubes as a primary source of forage. They are a component of mashes.
It’s about the cubing process, how hard they are compressed, rather than how long they sit around
Hot water definitely helps, but I’ve had cubes so dense it took an hour to soak through enough to feed them. And that’s with me standing there breaking up the cubes with a metal stick. Wouldn’t DREAM of feeding them dry 
Nope, it’s the process they go through. Some are extremely compacted and come out more like a (giant) cube-shaped pellet. Others are not as compacted and come out looking like hay that’s been roughly smooshed into a cube shape.
I hear about people feeding cubes as primary forage in California and know they can’t be like my rock hard cubes.
I knew someone in Ontario who did, and always fed on them at floor level and made out just fine … with the giant softer ones. Pretty sure that a barn full of horses eating only those rock hard ones would be seeing the vet far more frequently than necessary.
Here is what I have observed about cubes - the oat/ alfalfa or timothy/alfalfa cubes soak up faster and softer than straight alfalfa cubes. I think the straight alfalfa cubes have a higher ratio of leaf to stem and that is what compacts so hard. The grass hay/ alfalfa cubes are stemmier and don’t compact as hard. I always used hot water which helps but some cubes have centers that don’t soak up much liquid and remain hard.
I had two horses that had a fractured tooth that I fed soaked cubes to. It might have been a coincidence but maybe the harder cores contributed to the problem. Hard to tell though.
The ones I’ve used (several different brands) have all been straight alfalfa. Some packed like bricks, others larger and looser. Pretty sure it’s not the hay type but the equipment used that causes different texture.
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