10 Pesos Havana Harbor

Issued to commemorate the centennial of the USS Maine explosion in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898 — the incident that propelled the United States into the Spanish-American War and effectively ended Spanish colonial rule in Cuba. The cause of the explosion was never conclusively determined, though the Hearst press famously didn't wait for conclusions before printing "Remember the Maine."

Cuba issuing this coin a century later carries an obvious irony: the nation that gained nominal independence through that war had, by 1998, spent nearly four decades under a government openly hostile to the United States.