The Real Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pais of Havana
A subscription society of Havana that ran free primary schools, a public library, a botanical garden, an anatomy museum and a midwifery class, and printed its own accounts. Its 1834 proceedings count 6,080 children taught and 8,000 left without teaching, price the gap at 24,600 pesos a year against 4,600 spent, and count only white children. The same volume treats the cholera dead of 1833 as lost capital.
Why this wins its question: In English the Havana Sociedad Economica appears, when it appears, as a clause about creole enlightenment or as an appendage to the sugar planters, and in either case without figures. This object is built from the society's own printed proceedings of 1834, read page by page, so that every number is the one it published about itself: 510, 120, 251 and 221 free places by district, 6,080 children taught, 8,000 untaught, 24,600 pesos needed against 4,600 spent, an income of 15,230 and a deficit of 2,000, a library it calls backward, a bridge built by voluntary subscription. It also takes the society at its word where the word is damaging - the schooling arithmetic counts white children only, and the same volume reckons the cholera deaths of enslaved people as destroyed capital - so that the philanthropy and the slave order appear as what they were in the document, a single institution.
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 society's own statement of what it was for is a list, printed in a petition to the crown inside its 1834 proceedings: "La educacion primaria, Senor; el dibujo; la literatura; la historia; una biblioteca publica; la agricultura en general; un jardin botanico; la industria y el comercio; la anatomia; la vacuna; una clase de obstectricia: tales son los graves asuntos que debe desempenar la Sociedad con arreglo a sus estatutos." The same petition asks for the restoration of a three per cent assignment and records that the botanical garden had had to be put under the protection of the Real Hacienda for its upkeep.
It was a working institution and not only a debating one. The same account lists an anatomical museum and chair of surgery and obstetrics founded in the military hospital of San Ambrosio in the time of Alejandro Ramirez, which the corporation "costea y sostiene", its regent Dr. Francisco Alonso y Fernandez having offered to continue teaching without salary or emolument; a class of midwives established in the charity hospital of San Francisco de Paula under Dr. Domingo Rosainz, its reglamento printed in the Diario of 12 June 1831; and a periodical, Memorias de la Sociedad, begun in January 1817 and suspended at the end of 1823 for want of funds.
Its schooling figures are precise, and they are the society's own. The state of schools presented in December 1831 counted, in the casco of Havana, 510 poor children taught free by convents and private masters obliged to teach some in proportion to the paying pupils; 120 in the Real Casa de Beneficencia; 251 in five free schools in Jesus Maria, Guadalupe and San Nicolas; and 221 in the town of Regla. Places private and free together came to 3,680, which with a further 2,400 who probably learned at home made 6,080 children receiving the first rudiments.
The society then set that figure against the population and published the shortfall rather than the achievement. Taking from the island's statistics 20,837 white children of both sexes in the jurisdiction of Havana - boys of five to fifteen, girls of five to twelve - and deducting 4,000 who had left school or were otherwise provided for, it found 16,837 without any destination, and after further deductions for country towns and for girls taught at home concluded that "ocho mil ninos solamente quedan sin ensenanza", of whom about 5,000 needed places.
The counting has a limit stated in its own words, and it is the limit that matters most. The universe of the calculation is "los ninos blancos de ambos sexos que existen en la jurisdiccion de la Habana". Free people of colour and the enslaved population of a slave society are outside the arithmetic of need; the deficit of 8,000 is a deficit among white children only. Nothing in these proceedings offers a corresponding count for anyone else.
It also priced the gap and printed its own deficit. Six institutes of 150 free children each at 3,000 pesos a year came to 18,000 pesos; with 2,000 for a school of linear drawing and three trade workshops and the 4,600 already spent annually, the branch needed 24,600 pesos a year, "al que solo puede ocurrirse por ahora con la mesquina cuota de cuatro mil seiscientos pesos". Against that stood an income of about 15,230 pesos - 200 pesos a month from the royal chests reserved to the botanical garden, 166 pesos 5 reales from the press for editing the Diario, 390 a month from the Real Aduana, 330 from the Real Junta de Fomento, and members' dues - leaving an annual deficit of nearly 2,000 pesos.
The society was a network rather than a single body, and the network was pointed at schooling. It exercised its economic functions in towns of the interior through deputations "que regidas por los mismos estatutos, dedican sus tareas a los ramos mas urgentes, con especialidad a la educacion publica": Puerto Principe established in 1813, Trinidad in the same year and re-established on 6 May 1827, Matanzas erected on 30 May 1827, the villa of Santa Clara founded on 20 November 1829, and the city of Santiago erected by an agreement of 1 March of the preceding year.
Its output was print as well as institutions. The same report lists, among the papers sent to the ministry, reflections on the construction and use of lightning rods published in 1812, a notice of the wax branch in 1815, a memoir on the commerce, cultivation and manufacture of the island's tobacco by Dr. Jose Fernandez de Madrid answering a subject the society had proposed in 1817, a posthumous eulogy of Juan Manuel O'Farrill, founder and first secretary of the corporation, and a booklet of "Consejos dirigidos a los maestros de primeras letras" then just published and circulated to every such teacher in the island.
What a provincial deputation actually did is set out in its own report. That of Puerto Principe founded a public library in August 1831 whose books were gathered by the contributions of its members and of the parent society, which gave up all its duplicate works, open to the public three days a week; resolved in 1832 to have a topographic plan of the city and its surroundings drawn by one of its members; kept a commission gathering documents for a history of the island from the Ayuntamiento's archives and the public offices; commissioned in March 1830 a statistical survey of San Fernando de Nuevitas; proposed a road passable in all seasons between the city and Nuevitas; and was building a bridge over the river Tinima at the paso de Carrasco "por contribucion voluntaria del vecindario". Its report, signed at Puerto Principe on 20 November 1833, also records a case of meteorological instruments received from Paris through Ramon de la Sagra to begin the observation of the atmosphere of a region its author calls, in point of physical geography, absolutely virgin and intact, and thanks its treasurer Ignacio de Torres for constantly supplying its commitments out of his own pocket so that its agreements should not be illusory.
The deputation's own verdict on that list is worth setting beside it. In the closing paragraph of the same report: measured against the situation of the country the works undertaken exceed the deputation's strength, and "si se atiende a nuestros deseos, nada hemos hecho".
The society did not flatter its own institutions. Of the library in Havana the report says only that there exists a Biblioteca "cuyo estado de atraso se califica en las actas publicas de las juntas generales", and elsewhere that the commission appointed to visit it a year earlier had never reported. A body that prints the backwardness of its own library and the size of its own deficit is a more useful witness than one that does not.
The cost of the order these men belonged to is legible in the same volume, in their own voice, and it is not a matter of inference. Writing of the cholera epidemic, the section observes that the calamity was worse in a country "en cuya organizacion, entrando como un elemento vital el establecimiento de la esclavitud", because in striking the enslaved population of the estates the epidemic "no solo destruye al individuo sino tambien al capital empleado en su compra", a loss the more painful as it falls on the property which is the principal element of the island's agricultural wealth. It attributes the mortality to the crowding in which the enslaved live on the estates, their unavoidable want of cleanliness, the bad quality of their food, and the harsh nature of the labour - and calls their listlessness a condition inseparable from their state.
The two halves belong to one institution and are printed within seventy pages of each other: the same corporation that ran free schools, vaccinators for the extramural districts, a midwifery class and a public library also reasoned about the deaths of enslaved people as a destruction of capital, and counted the children of the island's future by colour. Read for either half alone the volume misleads; the achievement and the order that paid for it are one record.