The new 500 and 5,000 escudo banknotes are already in circulation in Cape Verde, with the 200 escudo note honoring poet Jorge Barbosa (1902-1971) and the 5,000 escudo note featuring the country's first president, Aristides Pereira (1923-2011).

The 500 escudo banknote also highlights the island of Santiago, the birthplace of Jorge Barbosa, a founder of the Claridade literary movement that marks a phase of contemporary aesthetics and language in Cape Verde and which called for cultural, social and political emancipation of society, bringing attention to the realities of daily life and whose poetry translates the archipelago's problems and the social drama of the Cape Verdean people, in constant struggle with adversity due to drought, famine, emigration, isolation and insularity.

The 5,000 escudo banknote is also a tribute to the home of Aristides Pereira, Boa Vista Island, and depicts a landscape with the chimney of a pottery factory buried by sands in the foreground.

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New banknotes come into circulation in Cape Verde (www.cp-africa.com/2015/11/03/new-banknotes-come-into-circulation-in-cape-verde/)