Renta de loteria de la isla de Cuba (1812-1844): a Mexican rulebook, a four-peso ticket cut into eighths, and a charity line of 3,600 pesos
The Havana state lottery, ordered by royal order of 28 April 1810 and run from 1812 under the reglamento of the Mexico lottery of 1769 - one Indies institution governed by another's rulebook. Its ordinance of 1836 divided the four-peso ticket into eighths so that small purses could play, locked the draw behind three keys held by three officers, and left, in the accounts it prints, 3,600 pesos a year for the poorhouse.
Why this wins its question: Writing in English on Spanish American lotteries is thin and usually anecdotal - a sentence about the Real Loteria of New Spain funding charity, without the rule or the number. This object goes to the 1845 compilation that prints the Cuban ordinance of 1836 in full and reports what the articles actually say: the four-peso ticket divided into quarters and eighths so that all players could reach it; the chest of three locks with three named key-holders; the glass-topped board and the public slate written into the text so as to leave no room for "la menor sospecha del genio mas suspicaz"; the two-year lapse of unclaimed prizes to the treasury; the nineteen collectorships named town by town. It also fixes the point that the Havana lottery was governed from 1812 by the Mexico reglamento of 1769, one American institution running on another's rulebook. And it prints the number that a promotional account would omit: 3,600 pesos a year to the poorhouse against a product of 227,235.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
What was opened. The entry "LOTERIA (renta de) en la isla de Cuba" occupies pages 191 to 205 of Jose Maria Zamora y Coronado, "Biblioteca de legislacion ultramarina en forma de diccionario alfabetico", Madrid, Imprenta de Alegria y Charlain, 1845, read here as page scans of the original imprint. A discrepancy is carried rather than resolved: the Google Books catalogue titles the volume "J-O" while the running foot of the pages read prints "TOM. IV.".
The founding fact is an institutional transfer inside the Indies, and it runs from Mexico to Havana rather than from Madrid. By real orden of 28 April 1810 the establishment of a lottery at Havana was ordered by way of trial, following the plan proposed by its intendancy in the consulta of 3 January of that year, "el de gobernarse por el reglamento de la de Mejico de 20 de diciembre de 1769". The precept was reiterated by the real orden of 27 January 1812, carried out on 14 April, and the first draw was held on 11 September 1812.
It was then pulled toward peninsular practice and put under audit. A real orden of 3 July 1813 sought to make the new establishment's institutions uniform so far as possible with those governing in the peninsula, enclosing a copy of the peninsular reglamento of 25 December 1811. That of 3 July 1814 approved the arrangement of employees and salaries and required statements showing the branch's progress. Its accounts were presented and glossed annually in the tribunal mayor de cuentas, by the real orden of 23 June 1815 and because the branch was expressly named in the contaduria mayor's ordinance of 10 November 1828.
The ordinance the entry prints entire was approved by decree of 27 May and given on 1 June 1836 in the name of Isabel II. Its preamble states the motive without decoration: the provisional state of the branch, "los considerables ingresos que proporciona al erario, y la decidida inclinacion hacia dicho establecimiento de todas las clases de aquel pais" had shown the need to give it a more convenient and stable form, not only to keep it prosperous but to increase, if possible, by the scrupulousness of its operations "la confianza publica en que estriba su credito".
Article 1 places the branch under the intendente de ejercito superintendente general delegado de real hacienda, by real orden of 5 December 1833, and then prints the whole payroll: a contador at 2,000 pesos a year; three oficiales at 1,000, 800 and 700; three escribientes of the first class at 500 each and others at 420, 360 and 300; three marcadores at 550, 400 and 300; a tesorero colector principal at 2,000; an oficial at 800, an escribiente at 450, two ticket sellers in the principal collectory at 500 for the morning hours and 300 for the afternoon, and a portero for all the offices at 450.
The same article maps the island by naming its collectorships, which is what makes the entry a document about reach and not only about revenue. Nineteen foraneo collectors "por ahora", paid 3 per cent on what they sell, are placed at the city of Cuba, Bayamo, Puerto-Principe, Trinidad, Remedios, Villa-Clara, Matanzas, Jaruco, Guines, Madruga, Guira, Guanajay, Cienfuegos, San Antonio, Bahia-honda, Guanabacoa, Santiago, el Cano and el Calvario; five extramural collectors at 2 per cent at Jesus del Monte, Jesus Maria, Guadalupe, San Lazaro and San Nicolas; and ten intramural subcollectors at 1.5 per cent in named streets and quarters of Havana.
Articles 2 and 3 set the money. The sortable fund stood at 70,000 pesos in the ordinary draws and 140,000 in the extraordinary one held every November "en celebridad de los dias de mi amada hija la reina dona Isabel II", to be varied as the public's interest required. From the fund of each draw 25 per cent, "o sea la cuarta parte", was deducted for the renta and its costs, the other three quarters being distributed in prizes to the winners.
Article 4 states a deliberate design decision about who was meant to play. The fund was to be collected in shares or tickets of four pesos in the ordinary draws and double in the extraordinary, "dividiendolos en cuartos y octavos, a fin de que esten al alcance de posibilidad de todos los jugadores", each fraction printed with the day, month and year, the number of the draw it belonged to, and, if a quarter or an eighth, its value. A half-peso stake was the floor the rule was written to create.
Articles 6 to 10 are a procedure for making fraud difficult in public, and they are the most interesting part of the document. Eight days before each draw the chief officer, a regidor, the contador and the tesorero met at the treasury, put the globes in public view, drew out and counted the numbered and prize balls of the previous draw and returned them; the globes were then closed and their keys placed in a small chest with three distinct locks whose key-holders were the chief officer, the regidor and the contador. At the draw itself the chest was opened before the public, an officer kept exact record, and an officer commanding a piquete stood by to keep order.
The publicity requirement is written into the text rather than left to practice. The act was to proceed with all the solemnity and circumspection owed to the public, drawing and announcing the balls of numbers and prizes "con tal notoriedad, que se evite aun la menor sospecha del genio mas suspicaz"; the drawn balls were then placed in a board with a glass lid and three locks that kept them visible while preventing any casual straying, and the numbers and prizes were stamped as they came on a large slate placed in public view. After the draw the checked note was handed to the printer.
Three further articles show where the house's advantage lay. Article 11 has the plan of the following year's fourteen ordinary draws and one extraordinary agreed each June and signed in a book. Article 12 lapses any prize to the renta whose owner has not come to collect it within two years of the draw, with no action or right remaining to him thereafter. Article 13 forbids any collector to hold more tickets than assigned or to ask gratifications from buyers, on pain of dismissal from the service - a rule that exists because the practice did.
The entry closes with the branch's own numbers under the heading "Valores de esta renta hasta 1844". From 11 September 1812 to 14 January 1829 there were 158 ordinary and 27 extraordinary draws, with a total fund of 13,892,500 pesos at four pesos a ticket and double in the extraordinary ones, of which the quarter part corresponded to the renta - which also took the value of unsold tickets and the prizes won by them, and by players who did not claim in time. In the year 1837 the product rose to 227,235 pesos and salaries and costs to 62,305.
The itemised statement is the honest counterweight to everything above, and it belongs to 1842 rather than 1837 - the sentence is compressed and says the costs were "reducidos en el de 42, por un estado de la renta de 31 de diciembre". They then consist of 17,256 pesos 7 reales in salaries; 3,891.4 in commissions at 2 and 1.5 per cent; 12,221.2 in allowances to other sellers at 500 and 600 pesos; 11,291.5 for the year's printing of tickets by contract; 3,600 as the assignment to the casa de BENEFICENCIA, capitalised in the original; and 1,017.7 in office and ordinary costs.
What the figures mean, stated as an inference and not as the document's own claim. Against a product of 227,235 pesos in 1837, an annual assignment of 3,600 pesos to the poorhouse is about one and a half per cent of the gross and less than a third of what the same statement spends on printing tickets. The lottery of Cuba was a revenue branch of the royal treasury that carried a charitable charge, not a charity funded by a lottery; and the four-peso ticket cut into eighths, whatever else it did, extended a levy on hope to the purses that could least carry it. Both readings sit on the same printed page.
What this object rests on, and what it does not. It rests on a compiler's legal dictionary of 1845 that reproduces the ordinance of 1836, not on the original printing of that ordinance, and not on the treasury accounts behind the figures it quotes. The Mexico reglamento of 20 December 1769, which is the hinge of the whole entry, is reported here in a single line of the 1845 text and was not opened; nothing in this object should be read as a description of the Mexican lottery itself. No independent audit, and no Cuban archival series, was consulted against the numbers.