5 Pesos Johann Sebastian Bach

Cuba's hard-currency commemorative program of the 1980s was largely designed for export — these coins were sold to foreign collectors to generate convertible currency for the Castro government, which had negligible domestic coin-collecting market. Bach appears here as part of a broader series honoring composers and cultural figures, a curiously cosmopolitan gesture from a government otherwise hostile to Western bourgeois tradition.

The .999 fineness is notably purer than the .900 silver common to most commemorative issues of the period.