Cuba

Spanish Cuba reckoned in the peso de a ocho, the eight-real silver piece struck at Mexico City and Potosí and circulating on the island alongside the gold escudo at two pesos to the escudo; Havana itself minted no coin before the nineteenth century, so the island’s accounts were kept in a money it imported, and small change was so scarce that cut silver and locally countermarked pieces did duty for it. Because the colony’s wealth lay in fortification contracts, tobacco, sugar and the treasure fleets that wintered at Havana, the surviving paper is overwhelmingly institutional: cabildo minutes, royal cédulas, and above all the chapter acts and fábrica accounts of the cathedrals of Santiago de Cuba and Havana, several of which survived the fires, hurricanes and the 1662 English sack that destroyed so much else. Those church books are the reason Cuba can be documented at all for a record of creative spending: the cathedral chapel was the island’s only standing professional ensemble, and its budgets were itemised post by post, so a petition like Esteban Salas’s of 1764 records not just what a composer was paid but what the chapter thought a singer, a harpist and a bassoonist were each worth.

Making a film here? The Canada–Cuba corridor covers the treaty, the incentives, and where to start.