50 Centavos Fuertes

Banco de Cuyo was one of several provincial Argentine banks authorized under the 1854 banking legislation that briefly allowed individual provinces to charter their own note-issuing institutions. The arrangement collapsed quickly — most of these banks were undercapitalized and their notes traded at steep discounts against Buenos Aires issues. Banco de Cuyo, based in Mendoza, was among the shorter-lived ones.

The incomplete date field — "18__" — indicates blanks left for manuscript completion at the point of issue, a common practice among Argentine provincial issuers of the 1850s and 1860s. No fully dated example has been widely documented in the major reference collections.