50 Pesos Banco Español de La Habana

The Banco Español de La Habana was established by royal charter in 1856 as the first bank of issue in Cuba, then still a Spanish colony, and this 50 Pesos note from its inaugural series represents the bank's first year of operation. Bradbury Wilkinson, already well established as a security printer by the mid-1850s, produced the plates in London — a common arrangement for colonial currency where local printing infrastructure was either absent or untrusted.

The uniface production is worth noting: single-sided printing was a cost and logistics decision, not a security oversight, though it left these notes more vulnerable to counterfeiting than the bank's later issues. P#A1 status confirms this as the earliest catalogued type for the institution.