1 Peso Castro and Hemingway

Cuba has issued commemorative pesos bearing foreign cultural figures since the 1990s, a practice rooted partly in hard-currency tourism revenue and partly in Fidel Castro's genuine cultivation of relationships with prominent international leftists and intellectuals. Hemingway's connection to Cuba was substantive — he lived at Finca Vigía outside Havana for roughly twenty years and was personally acquainted with Castro, who awarded him a fishing trophy at the 1960 Ernest Hemingway Billfishing Tournament just months before relations between Cuba and the United States collapsed entirely.

That 1960 meeting remains the only documented direct encounter between the two men.