1961 5 Centimos Cuba Minted In Slovakia?

Have you checked https://en.numista.com/
John1

Communist mints could make nice-looking coins. For the most part, they simply chose not to. The Czechoslovakian mints were probably better at making decent-looking coins than the other Communist mints, which may be why the Cuban coin order was sent there instead of, say, East Germany or Moscow.

I have always assumed that Communists deliberately made their coins to look cheap and nasty for ideological reasons. People in Communist countries were taught from childhood that money was a capitalist tool, a necessary evil but one which would eventually be abolished as redundant once the socialist utopia arrived. So why spend money and effort on designing and making something that wouldn't be needed for much longer? I'm also sure this is also why the dates on typical Communist coins are so tiny and hard-to-read: they wanted to hide the fact that the arrival of utopia was way, way behind schedule.

Further, the cheap ingredients of your typical Communist coinage did not survive hoarding. The nickel-brass alloy favoured by the Soviets, for example, is particularly prone to rusting away to nothing after just a short time exposed to the elements or buried in the ground - as anyone trying to collect nice uncorroded Soviet coins can attest. I am certain this was a deliberate design feature, and not a bug. Good Communist citizens are supposed to put their trust in the State, not in their secret personal fortune they've buried in their backyard. There is a reason why the Soviet Union did not make any silver coins for circulation after 1931, and why none of the other Communist countries ever issued any silver circulating coins: silver was too easy to hoard, and money was supposed to have value only while the State said it had value, not because of some objective intrinsic value of the metal the pieces of money contained.

In the case of Cuba, I would assume the key messaging the new Communist government wanted to send immediately after the revolution was "don't panic, it's still business as usual", rather than immediately switching to more ideologically acceptable coinage straight away. Hence the new coins that still closely matched the old pre-Communist coins. Besides, pre-Communist Cuban coinage still had a "communist vibe" to it, with all the stars and revolutionary symbols. Which is probably also why Cuba was the only Communist country to not change it's coat of arms - not even slightly - after the Communist revolution.

I disagree with Sap about the small numbers of the year of minting. They are quite large on the coins of the Soviet Union. But I will add that the design of coins in the Soviet Union was very boring. Only the nominal value surrounded by wheat leaves and the coat of arms on the reverse side. No scenes, no workers or peasants (except for a few denominations of the early Soviet period). That is why I did not want to collect coins of the USSR, they are boring and monotonous. Only the denomination of the coin changes, there is no artistic value in them. And if emergency money or too poor countries can be forgiven for this during a difficult period, then I doubt that there were no artists and engravers in the Soviet Union who would create real masterpieces in the world of coinage.

Very interesting topic.