1 Peso Alexander von Humboldt

Cuba issued this coin in 1989 to mark the 160th anniversary of Humboldt's publication of his landmark work on the geography of Cuba and New Spain. Humboldt visited the island twice — in 1800 and 1804 — and his political writings were notably critical of Spanish colonial administration and the island's slave economy, observations that made him a complicated figure to celebrate under any Cuban government, yet he has been claimed by both pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba as a national intellectual patron.