An intendancy was deemed necessary, and the Home Government appointed Alexander Ramirez to the post in February, 1813.  He promptly introduced important reforms in the administration, and caused regular accounts to be kept.  He made ample and liberal concessions to commerce, opened five additional ports with custom-houses, freed agriculture from the trammels that had impeded its development, and placed labor, instruments, seeds, and modern machinery within its reach.  He printed and distributed short essays or manuals on the cultivation of different products and the systems adopted by other nations, promoted the immigration of Canary Islanders, founded the Royal Economic Society of Friends of the Country, and edited the Diario Economico de Puerto Rico, the first number of which appeared February 28, 1814.

The first year after the establishment of these improvements, notwithstanding the abolition of some of the most onerous taxes, the revenues of the capital rose to $161,000, and the new custom-houses produced $242,842.

Having placed this island’s financial administration on a sound basis, Ramirez was called upon by the Government to perform the same valuable services for Cuba.  Unfortunately, his successors here soon destroyed the good effects of his measures by continual variations in the system, and in the commercial tariffs.  They attempted to prevent smuggling by increasing the duties, the very means of encouraging contraband trade, and the old mismanagement and malversations in the custom-houses revived.  One intendant, often from a mere spirit of innovation, applied to the court for a decree canceling the regulations of his predecessor, so that, from the concurring effects of contraband and mismanagement, commerce suffered, and the country became once more impoverished.

The revenues fell so low and the malversation of public money reached such a height that the captain-general found it necessary in 1825 to charge the military commanders of the respective districts with the prevention of smuggling.  He placed supervisors of known intelligence and probity in each custom-house to watch and prevent fraud and peculation.  These measures almost doubled the amount of revenue in the following year (1826).

As late as 1810 the imports in Puerto Rico exceeded three times the sum of the produce exported.  The difference was made up by the “situados,” or remittances in cash from Mexico, which began early in the seventeenth century, when the repeated attacks on the island by French and English privateers forced the Spanish Government to choose between losing the island or fortifying it.  The king chose the latter, and made an assignment on the royal treasury of Mexico of nearly half a million pesos per annum.  With these subsidies all the fortifications were constructed and the garrison and civil and military employees were paid, till the insurrection in Mexico put a stop to the fall of this pecuniary manna.