10 Pesos King Philip of Castile and Lower Countries

This issue belongs to Cuba's long-running series commemorating the quincentennial of Columbus's 1492 voyage, a program that generated dozens of silver and gold pieces throughout the early 1990s as the Cuban state mint sought hard currency during the Special Period — the severe economic contraction that followed the Soviet collapse. Philip II, who inherited Castile and the Low Countries through the Habsburg dynastic machinery rather than by conquest, presided over the peak of New World silver extraction, with Potosí alone producing an estimated 45,000 tons of silver over its working life.