The Papel Periodico de la Havana, 1790, and the public library its subscriptions paid for
A twice-weekly half-sheet begun in Havana on 31 October 1790, edited first by the Captain General himself and then by a committee of the economic society. Its editors printed a wholesale price list, ship movements and a daily meteorological table, and put the residue of the subscription money into a fund that opened a public library in July 1793. The same sheet carried advertisements for enslaved barbers and closed its notices "with permission of the Superior Government".
Why this wins its question: Ask what a colonial Spanish American newspaper was and the usual answer is a sentence of dates. Set out here instead is the working machinery of one: the editorial plan in its committee's own words, the rule that no notice of a purchase or sale could be printed unless the editors knew who had asked for it, the four-to-six pesos paid to a man to fetch the shipping returns, 126 subscribers at six reales, the thirds taken by printer and distributor, and the 1188 pesos 7 reales of residue that opened a public library in July 1793. Against that, the price given by the second source will not reconcile with the first and is left unreconciled; the second source's own footnote admits it leaned on the first, so the agreement between them is discounted rather than advertised; and the cost is quoted from the same pages as the achievement - "Con permiso del Superior Gobierno" printed under a public notice, and advertisements for enslaved hairdressers listed by the 1857 author himself as the thing that most catches a reader's eye.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The Papel Periodico was not the first paper printed in Havana and its own historians say so. A footnote in the 1859 Apuntes records that a Gaceta had been published earlier, in 1782, for news and advertisements; the 1857 Habana antigua y moderna names Diego de la Barrera as the man who began it in that year, calls it the first periodical of Havana and of the island, and says it was reduced, one may say, to publishing political news and advertisements. What happened in 1790 was that the Gaceta was taken under the protection of the Captain General and converted into a literary-economic paper under a new title.
Both sources give the same starting date. Caballero's report of 2 September 1794, transcribed in the Apuntes, says the President had barely taken the reins of the government of the city when he set about establishing it, and that three months later, on 31 October 1790, the Papel Periodico de la Habana began to circulate through the hands of many subscribers and of the whole public. The 1857 account gives the same day and adds that the Captain General, Luis de las Casas, counted as its redactor, handing the editorship afterwards to the Real Sociedad Economica, which committed it to a deputation modified in 1797 and again in 1799.
The editorial plan survives in the deputation's own words. Discourses and treatises sent in were to be preferred where they treated of agriculture, commerce and the arts, as matters of better known utility; anecdotes and notices of inventions in the sciences and arts were not to be excluded; monthly the paper would print the schedule of wholesale prices bought at first hand by the principal merchants and of most current consumption in the city; notices of finds and losses, purchases and sales would be carried, "bien entendido que antes de imprimirse debe constarnos quien es el sugeto que solicita su publicacion"; and the arrivals and departures of shipping would be obtained by paying one man four or six pesos to supply them from the administration itself.
The same plan states the limits of the regime in its own parenthesis. The Society was to subscribe to the different periodical papers published in the Peninsula of Spain, in America, "y tambien (si fuera posible y permitido) a los que se publiquen en los paises estrangeros y que solo traten de asuntos literarios". Permission is a condition the editors write into their own plan, and the foreign papers they hope for are restricted to literary matter by their own hand rather than by an order quoted from outside.
The accounts are itemised and the two sources do not agree on the price. Caballero in September 1794 counts 126 subscribers, each paying six reales a month with delivery to the house on the days of publication, Sundays and Thursdays, plus sale at the printing office at half a real, producing monthly one hundred and forty-eight, one hundred and fifty-five and one hundred and sixty-two pesos, more or less. Of this the printer took a third of the subscriptions and two-thirds of what he sold, the distributor another third of the first, the conductor of news from the administration six pesos. The 1857 account, describing the paper's whole run, gives the subscription as fourteen reales fuertes a month. The figures are not reconciled here; they may refer to different years or different moneys, and the confidence is set accordingly.
The residue built a library. It was deposited with the President and by him with the printer, to meet the extraordinary costs of supplements whose scanty sale did not repay the printing, "y para erigir la Biblioteca publica". Caballero states that the deposit had reached 1188 pesos 7 reales at the end of April of the previous year, that the President judged this fund enough to propose the creation of the library to the Society, and that the only difficulty, finding a room, was removed by a member who offered one free of charge. The 1857 account confirms the outcome from the other side: the Library, like the paper and the Guia, was owed to Las Casas, who saw it opened in July 1793 in the house and under the direction of a named member, passing afterwards into the care of the Real Sociedad Economica. The two spell that member's name differently, Robredo and Robrero.
What the paper actually looked like can be read rather than inferred, because the 1857 book reprints an issue entire. Number 62, Sunday 17 August 1800, opens with the saint of the day and the forty hours' devotion at La Merced; then "Precios de varios comestibles y demas, necesario para el abasto publico, segun el arancel de la fecha" - the pound of ham of the Kingdom at three and a half reales, that of the North at two, island almonds at eight, the thousand of cacao at fourteen, the arroba of clean rice at fifteen with twelve ounces for half a real; and then a table of meteorological observations giving thermometer, barometer, winds and state of the atmosphere for morning, afternoon and night, day by day.
Censorship is printed on the face of the sheet. The public notice reprinted immediately before that issue - announcing a bullfight of ten bulls for 30 November whose takings were to help build a fountain on the Paseo, with entry at two reales and shaded balconies at three pesos - ends with the line "Con permiso del Superior Gobierno". The permission is not an external fact recovered by a historian; it is a formula the paper set in type.
The commercial public this paper served was a slaveholding one, and the source names it without being asked to. Explaining why he chose these samples, the 1857 author says he picked the matters that most catch the eye today, and lists them: advertisements of calesas, of claves, that is pianos, and of "negros peluqueros" - enslaved barbers advertised among the goods, since wigs being large, curled and powdered, it was without doubt a great saving to own one's own hairdresser. The improvement in public information and the traffic in people ran through the same columns.
The two witnesses here are not fully independent, and the weaker one says so. The footnote opening chapter XII of the 1857 book states that its author was much helped by the luminous and interesting articles, still unpublished, written on the same matter by his distinguished friend Bachiller y Morales, as a continuation of those already published under the modest title of Apuntes para la historia de las letras de Cuba, whose reading he recommends. Their agreement on the date of 31 October 1790 is therefore worth less than two independent attestations would be, and their disagreements on the subscription price and on the librarian's name are recorded above rather than resolved.
The paper did not end but changed names. The 1857 account has it becoming the Aviso in 1805 and the Diario de la Habana in 1810, the printing passing in 1811 to the well-furnished office of Arazoza y Soler. The 1859 Apuntes says the same in less exact terms, that the periodical was converted into the Aviso and lastly into the Diario, at the motion of a named member. The difference of dating between the two is small but real and is left standing.