Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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The
Custom-House Of The Havannah, Which Before 1794 Yielded Less Than
600,000 Piastres, And From 1797 To 1800,
1,900,000 piastres, pours
into the treasury, since the declaration of free trade, a revenue
(importe liquido) of more
Than 3,100,000 piastres.* (* The
custom-house of Port-au-Prince, at Hayti, produced in 1825, the sum of
1,655,764 piastres; that of Buenos Ayres, from 1819 to 1821, average
year, 1,655,000 piastres. See Centinela de La Plata, September 1822
Number 8; Argos de Buenos Ayres Number 85.)
The island of Cuba as yet contains only one forty-second part of the
population of France; and one half of its inhabitants, being in the
most abject indigence, consume but little. Its revenue is nearly equal
to that of the Republic of Columbia, and it exceeds the revenue of all
the custom-houses of the United States* before the year 1795, when
that confederation had 4,500,000 inhabitants, while the island of Cuba
contained only 715,000. (* The custom-houses of the United States,
which yielded in 1801 to 1808 sixteen millions of dollars, produced in
1815 but 7,282,000.) The principal source of the public revenue of
this fine colony is the custom-house, which alone produces above
three-fifths, and amply suffices for all the wants of the internal
administration and military defence. If in these latter years, the
expense of the general treasury of the Havannah amounted to more than
four millions of piastres, this increase of expense is solely owing to
the obstinate struggle maintained between the mother country and her
freed colonies.
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