centavo – S. “one cent.” Cuban centavos were minted in Philadelphia and had a concentration of 75% copper and 25% nickel. According to the American historian Murat Halstead, the pennies were too heavy and cumbersome and no one wanted to have them: “[N]o ordinary man would think of getting change in copper, as he would have to hire a pack mule to take it home, and then he would have to get rid of it in driblets, as cabmen object to taking twenty cents in copper, and small merchants do likewise, preferring silver and insisting upon getting it” (Halstead 439).