5 Centimos Agramunt; Cafe del P. S. U. C.

During the Spanish Civil War, the collapse of small-change circulation in Republican-held Catalonia prompted hundreds of local bodies — municipal councils, trade unions, cooperatives, and in this case a café affiliated with the PSUC — to issue their own fractional currency. The PSUC, formed in July 1936 through the merger of several Catalan Marxist parties and closely aligned with Moscow-backed Communism, was unusual in having its local social venues function as quasi-financial entities. A party café in a small Lleida province town like Agramunt issuing fiduciary instruments is precisely the kind of hyperlocal monetary improvisation that makes this period unlike any other in Spanish numismatic history.

These emisiones de guerra are notoriously fragile; the thick card stock was chosen for durability but warps badly with moisture, and Agramunt fell to Nationalist forces in early 1938.