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Abstract

The Situado was a Spanish financing mechanism without parallel in other European colonial models. Although its genesis is located in the sixteenth century, it is the eighteenth century where it reached its highest rates of remission to favored areas, those peripheries of the empire without the necessary resources to achieve financial self-management, but with a geopolitical centrality that turned them into the “keys of the New World”. The present work highlights the historiographical references that concentrate on the financial relations between New Spain and Cuba and allows the article to transgress the geographical borders of the New Spain’s treasury to highlight the articulating and Caribbean balancing role that the villa of Havana played in Spanish imperial strategy. In the same way, it provokes the reader to open those thematic doors that remain in the shadows within the multiplicity of consequences that these cash shipments had on the “national” economies of the Caribbean military posts.

Key words: Viceroyalty, situado, Havana, historiography, Caribbean.