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50 Pesos
| Issuer | El Tesoro de la Isla de Cuba |
|---|---|
| Year | 1891 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Central vignette of Mercury alongside an allegorical female figure, flanked by the arms of Cuba. The issuer's title runs across the top panel, with the face value rendered in numerals at the upper left and lower right corners and in full letters at the lower left corner and beneath the issuer's name. Date of issue, Habana 12 de Agosto de 1891, appears in the lower text panel. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | EL TESORO DE LA ISLA DE CUBA 50 CINCUENTA PESOS (Translation: The Treasury of the island of Cuba 50 Fifty Pesos) |
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| Comments |
By 1891, Cuba remained a Spanish colony in the final years of a deeply strained relationship with Madrid — the Ten Years' War had ended in 1878 without independence, and the island's financial administration was a patchwork of competing obligations and debt. The Tesoro de la Isla de Cuba was essentially a colonial treasury instrument, not an independent central bank, and these notes circulated under the fiscal authority of the Spanish crown rather than any Cuban institution with autonomous standing.
Bradbury Wilkinson's involvement places the printing firmly in London, which was unremarkable for Spanish colonial issues of this period — the peninsula's own printing infrastructure was rarely trusted for high-denomination colonial paper. The 1891 series preceded the catastrophic 1895–98 war by only a few years, and much of this issue was effectively rendered obsolete by the currency chaos that followed Cuban independence in 1898.