1 Cent Seamen's Trade Vouchers. Baltona

Baltona (Przedsiębiorstwo Handlu Zagranicznego Baltona) was a Polish state foreign-trade enterprise that operated duty-free shops aboard vessels and in seaports, accessible only to Polish merchant and fishing fleet crews. These vouchers functioned as internal scrip — denominated in cents rather than złoty to allow purchases of Western goods priced in hard currency equivalents, sidestepping the inconvertibility of the złoty entirely. Crew members received them as a controlled substitute for actual foreign exchange, which they were legally barred from holding.

The cent denomination points to the system's dollar-peg logic. One cent had no purchasing power alone; the small denominations existed to make change within the shipboard shop economy.