50 Gourdes Independence

The Independence series, launched in 2004 to mark Haiti's bicentennial, replaced the older Géographie series that had served since the 1990s. Thomas De La Rue produced the entire run, and the security specification — particularly the optically variable ink — represented a meaningful upgrade for a country whose earlier notes had been subject to fairly brazen counterfeiting in the informal economy.

P#274 ran with only minor plate revisions across a fifteen-year print window, which is why date collectors treat sub-varieties differently despite near-identical appearance.