Even relatively wealthier countries keep on hand some foreign currency. Countries floundering economically generally have no other choice: to shore up their accounts, they try to stockpile foreign hard currency, knowing their local denominations will generally be untrusted by the wealthier nations. Cuba, never very wealthy and left completely bereft when its biggest benefactor, the USSR, collapsed, allowed its citizens to conduct transactions in U.S. dollars right after that collapse — for a while.

On this day, October 25, in 2004, after a series of mounting sanctions on Cuba by the U.S., Cuban president Fidel Castro announced an end to the use of the U.S. dollar in commerce.

The move was obviously not intended to hurt the U.S. economy. What precisely was Castro’s motivation was an open question: it could be he intended to use the collected dollars to purchase oil on the international market, or he could have been using the sanctions as a pretext to exert more control on the Cuban economy. Whatever the case, Cuba became a dollarless country.