10 Pesos Amerigo Vespucci

Issued as part of Cuba's expansive commemorative program of the 1990s, this piece honors Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine merchant and explorer whose letters describing South America as a previously unknown continent — rather than Asia — prompted German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller to inscribe "America" on his 1507 world map. Cuba's state mint produced dozens of such silver commemoratives during this decade, many targeting the collector export market as a hard-currency revenue stream during the economic crisis following Soviet withdrawal.