50 Centavos

Cuba maintained two parallel currency systems from 1994 until their formal unification in 2021 — the Cuban Peso (CUP) and the Convertible Peso (CUC). This piece circulates in the CUP economy, the one used by ordinary Cubans for subsidized goods and state wages, while the CUC was pegged to the dollar and reserved largely for tourism and import transactions. The dual system was introduced as a direct response to the "Special Period," the severe economic contraction that followed the Soviet Union's collapse and the abrupt end of its subsidies to Havana.

Nickel-plated steel replaced the earlier nickel composition during this same period of austerity.