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50 Pesos
| Issuer | El Tesoro de la Isla de Cuba |
|---|---|
| Year | 1891 |
| Type | Log in to see details |
| Value | Log in to see details |
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| Printer | Bradbury Wilkinson and Company, United Kingdom (1856-1990) |
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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. |
|---|---|
| Obverse lettering | Log in to see details |
| Reverse description | Athena figures appear on both lateral panels, framing a central denomination numeral. The face value is repeated in numerals at all four corners, with the full denomination in letters along the bottom border and the issuer's title inscribed across the top. Fine guilloche lacework forms the background underprint throughout. |
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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.