1 Peso Havana Great Theater

Cuba's commemorative peso program of the 1980s was a hard-currency operation — these coins were never intended for domestic circulation but were sold abroad to generate foreign exchange for a government starved of it by the U.S. embargo. The Havana Great Theater, inaugurated in its current form in 1838 as the Tacón Theater, was one of the largest opera houses in the Western Hemisphere at the time of its construction, commissioned by the island's Captain-General Miguel Tacón largely as a vanity project during his notoriously authoritarian tenure.