1000 Pesos

The Banco Español de la Habana occupied an unusual position: a Spanish colonial institution printing its highest-denomination notes through an American firm in New York, at the very moment Cuba's Ten Years' War was tearing the island apart. The rebellion began in October 1868, and these notes were issued directly into that instability — the 1000 Peso denomination would have moved almost exclusively among merchants and colonial administrators, not ordinary Cubans.

ABNC's involvement was purely commercial; several Latin American and Caribbean issuers used them simultaneously, and the same New York presses were producing notes for governments on both sides of various conflicts without particular scruple.