1 Peso Blackbeard

Cuba issued this piece as part of a broader series of convertible peso coins targeting the tourist economy — a parallel currency system that ran alongside the standard peso and was explicitly designed to extract hard currency from foreign visitors. The "Blackbeard" designation refers to Edward Teach, the English pirate whose Caribbean operations in the early eighteenth century made him a fixture of regional lore, if not specifically Cuban history.

The convertible peso series of the 1990s reflects the desperation of the Special Period following Soviet subsidy collapse. Collector-oriented coins like this one were a deliberate revenue mechanism, not a circulating issue.