1 Peso Esperanto Congress

Cuba issued a small series of commemorative copper-nickel pesos in the late 1980s and early 1990s targeting the international thematic collector market rather than domestic circulation — hard currency generation was the explicit goal. This piece honors the Esperanto movement, the constructed language devised by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, which by 1990 had survived nearly a century of institutional skepticism, two world wars, and active suppression under Stalin, who viewed Esperanto speakers as a suspicious cosmopolitan network and had many of them shot or sent to the Gulag.