1 Peso Carlos J. Finlay

Carlos Juan Finlay, the Cuban physician who in 1881 identified the Aedes aegypti mosquito as the vector for yellow fever transmission, spent decades having his theory dismissed by the international medical establishment. It was Walter Reed's U.S. Army commission in 1900 that ultimately validated Finlay's work — a fact Cuban historiography has never allowed to be forgotten, and one that informed decades of commemorative output from the Banco Nacional celebrating him as a martyred scientific figure within anti-imperialist framing.

The 1988 date places this among Cuba's late-Soviet-era commemorative peso issues, produced largely for the collector export market rather than domestic circulation.