What a Cuban town budgeted for in 1863: vaccine, five teachers, a cemetery, and the capture of runaway slaves
Pezuela's 1866 dictionary prints Cuban municipal budgets article by article. Nuevitas in 1863 owed 12,384 pesos: five primary teachers, a contribution to a teacher-training school, vaccine conservators, relief for the insane, a cemetery. On the same page, 100 pesos for the capture of runaway slaves. In Matanzas, 1,000 pesos for vaccine conservators, 204 for genuine vaccine matter, 358.50 for the runaway-slave depot. Every figure is reconciled.
Why this wins its question: Arguments about whether the Spanish empire provided anything to the people it governed are almost always conducted at the level of decrees and generalities, because the decrees are what has been transcribed. This object answers the question with a municipal budget instead: a named Cuban town, a named year, every article numbered and priced, and the whole of it reconciled against the totals the source itself prints so a reader can check the arithmetic without the volume. It also refuses the two available comfortable readings. The town that budgeted 144 pesos for vaccine conservators and 1,980 for five schoolmasters budgeted 100 pesos for catching runaway slaves; the city that bought genuine vaccine matter for 204 pesos rented a depot for recaptured people for 358.50 and spent five times its whole charity chapter on its jail. Provision and coercion are in the same columns, in the same hand, and both are quoted.
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 source is not a description of the budgets but the budgets themselves. Pezuela's dictionary prints them under headings such as "Presupuesto de los gastos e ingresos municipales de la J. de Nuevitas para el ano de 1863", divided into a first section for expenditure, a first part for obligatory expenditure, and chapters numbered I to IX with every article separately numbered and priced. Two chapters in the Nuevitas budget - I, political government, and V, urban policing - carry only the note that there is no expenditure under that head, which tells the reader that the frame is a standard one applied to towns whether or not they had anything to put in it.
Nuevitas, a small jurisdiction, carried public vaccination as a standing obligatory charge. Chapter VII, Beneficencia, has two articles: number 17, "Vacuna - asignacion a los conservadores", 144 pesos, and number 18, "Dementes - socorros y gastos de los mismos", 20 pesos. The chapter totals 164. The sums are small; the point is that they are line items in an ordinary municipal budget rather than an emergency measure or a charitable appeal, sixty years after the Balmis expedition carried the vaccine to the Americas.
Schooling was the larger commitment of the two. Chapter VI, public instruction, pays the salaries of five primary schoolmasters at 1,980 pesos, school equipment, books and the rest at 114, and a contribution of 80 pesos to the escuela normal elemental for training primary teachers - 2,174 in all, more than thirteen times the whole beneficencia chapter.
Chapter VIII, public works, spends 1,000 pesos on paving and repairing streets, 25 on tools, 150 on the town hall, 2,000 on the works of the general cemetery and 500 on repairing the slaughterhouse, 3,675 in all. The largest single public-works item in the town's year is the cemetery.
The whole of Nuevitas's obligatory expenditure for 1863 came to 12,384 pesos. Among the small change of it, article 9 of the office chapter budgets 18 pesos for the subscription to the Gaceta - the town paid to receive the official gazette, which is how the legislation reached it.
The cost sits in the same document, four chapters earlier. Chapter IV, security policing, has three articles: wages of the municipal police at 720 pesos, of the rural police at 1,080, and article 13, "Aprehension de cimarrones", the capture of runaway slaves, at 100 pesos. The treasury that paid the vaccine conservators and the five schoolmasters paid the men who hunted people who had escaped slavery, and it did so on the same printed page under the same heading of obligatory expenditure.
Matanzas, a large city, ran the same structure at a different scale. Its beneficencia chapter pays two vaccine conservators 1,000 pesos and adds a separate article of 204 pesos for "gastos para la adquisicion del legitimo virus vacuno" - the cost of obtaining genuine vaccine matter, which is the practical problem of keeping a live vaccine alive in the tropics written into a budget line. It also carries 500 pesos jointly for the insane, for lepers and for the Casa de Beneficencia y Maternidad, 1,000 for transporting and lodging poor patients of the jurisdiction sent to the baths of San Diego, and 300 for the secretariat of the municipal board of charity: 3,004 in all.
Matanzas also paid to educate its people elsewhere. Its instruction articles include 240 pesos subsidising the school of Sabanilla, 204 for the secretariat of the local commission of primary instruction, 720 for maintaining three students at the teacher-training school at Guanabacoa, and 1,544 for maintaining two students at the escuela normal de arquitectura in Madrid. A Cuban city budgeted, as an obligatory charge, for keeping two of its own at a professional school across the Atlantic.
And Matanzas budgeted for slavery more heavily than Nuevitas did. Its public-works chapter includes 358.50 pesos for the rent and lighting of the house used as the depot for runaway slaves, and its chapter of Cargas carries 1,000 pesos for the service of moving "presos, dementes y cimarrones" to other places - prisoners, the insane and runaway slaves transported under one article and one appropriation.
The proportions are the argument, and they do not flatter the city. The largest single obligatory item on the Matanzas page read here is the maintenance of prisoners at 10,500 pesos, with a further 1,800 for prisoners' stays in the men's hospital; the public jail chapter totals 16,037, more than five times the entire beneficencia chapter of 3,004. A colonial city's budget spent far more on holding people than on healing them.
A note on how these figures were established, because the scan makes it necessary. The type in this digitisation renders the printed 1 and 4 almost identically, so no figure was accepted as read. Every one was checked against the chapter totals the source itself prints, and each reconciles exactly: Nuevitas's instruction chapter 1,980 plus 114 plus 80 equals the printed 2,174; its beneficencia chapter 144 plus 20 equals 164; its nine chapters sum to the printed 12,384; the Matanzas beneficencia articles 1,000, 204, 500, 1,000 and 300 sum to the printed 3,004; and its jail articles sum to the printed 16,037. Where a reading could not be reconciled it was not used.
The limit of the evidence should be stated plainly. These are budgets and not accounts. They record what a town was obliged to appropriate, not what it actually paid out, and Pezuela prints them without any audited outturn beside them. He is also a Spanish colonial official writing inside the slaveholding order in 1866, and he prints the runaway-slave articles without comment, as ordinary administration. Nothing here shows that the vaccine reached anybody; it shows that a Cuban town was required to appropriate money for it every year, which is a different and smaller claim.