5 Pesos Kon-Tiki

The Kon-Tiki expedition of 1947 saw Thor Heyerdahl and five crew members sail a balsa-wood raft roughly 4,300 miles across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia, aiming to demonstrate that pre-Columbian South Americans could have settled the islands. Cuba's decision to commemorate it four decades later reflects the island's habit during the 1980s of issuing collector silver for hard currency — these pieces circulated internationally as numismatic exports rather than domestically, a straightforward mechanism for generating foreign exchange under the U.S. embargo.