20 Pesos First Cuban Railroad

Cuba's first railroad, inaugurated in November 1837, predated Spain's own domestic rail network — a colonial anomaly explained entirely by the sugar industry's need to move cane from the interior plantations of Havana province to the coast. The line ran from Havana to Bejucal, roughly 27 kilometers, and was operational before the peninsula it nominally served had laid a single kilometer of track.

This 1988 issue belongs to a sustained program of Cuban commemorative silver coinage produced almost exclusively for the hard-currency export market, as the domestic economy ran on non-convertible pesos with no meaningful coin circulation of this kind.