50 Gourdes Holy Year

Haiti's 1983 "Holy Year" issue was struck to commemorate the 1983–1984 Catholic Jubilee and Pope John Paul II's visit to the island in March 1983 — the first papal visit in Haitian history. The country was then under Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the regime leveraged the visit heavily for legitimacy, a political backdrop that made the commemorative coinage as much a propaganda instrument as a devotional one.