100 Pesos First Cuban Railroad

Cuba launched this series to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the first railway in Latin America — a line built not for passengers or national development, but to haul sugar from inland plantations to the port of Havana. The railroad predated Cuban independence by decades and was financed largely by the planter class, making its celebration by a revolutionary government an ideologically awkward choice that the state navigated by framing it as a triumph of Cuban labor.

The Banco Nacional issued several denominations in this series simultaneously, with the one-ounce gold piece aimed squarely at the foreign collector market — hard currency being a chronic pressure point for the Cuban economy throughout the late 1980s.