50 Pesos Baseball, Piedfort

Cuba's piedfort program of the late 1980s and early 1990s occupied an awkward position: the coins were legal tender issued by a state whose currency was non-convertible, struck almost exclusively for hard-currency export sales to Western collectors. This piece is effectively a foreign-exchange instrument dressed as a coin. The double-thickness flan — the defining feature of any piedfort — required individual hand-feeding at the press, keeping mintages extremely low even by Cuban collector issue standards.