1 Peso Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, Pattern

Pattern coinage from Cuba in the late 1970s sits in a genuinely murky corner of numismatics — pieces like this were produced in limited quantities for official evaluation and never cleared for circulation, yet some found their way out of Havana through diplomatic channels and collector networks during the period of cautious international engagement following Cuba's 1975 intervention in Angola. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, the sugar planter who freed his slaves and launched the Ten Years' War in 1868, had been a fixture of Cuban nationalist iconography long before 1959.