International Cuban Philatelic Society

08/22/2026

In 1882 Cuba experienced a large theft of postage stamps. The government postal authorities overprinted their existing stamps with a series of five different spider web designs (arañitas) and devalued the original stamps so the thieves could not profit from their theft.
In my page of these arañitas I have titled them "Surcharges" which is not technically correct. A surcharge is any type of overprint that alters the price of a stamp or confirms the value in a new type of currency. The values remain the same in this case.
With respect to the "5 on 5" overprints in the upper right corner, the two top stamps are variations on the one below. One has a comma after the 5, one has no punctuation after the 5 and one has a period after the 5.

08/15/2026

08/15/2026

1896 POSTAL CARD VARIATIONS
The postal cards printed from 1892 through 1898 were printed on a large cardstock and then cut into ten cards. They were all individually typeset. Although I am sure that they tried to make all ten cards the same, the typesetting process was not perfect. The result was that there were small, sometimes tiny, imperfections on every card. This resulted in ten varieties of each card printed. Attached are the ten varieties of the 2 centavos 1896 cards with a blown-up illustration of what that particular variety looks like.

10/24/2025

CENTROS DE HOJA - the first issues, 1926.

10/24/2025

INTERNATIONAL MACHINE CANCELS
From 1911 until the Slogan Cancellations began in 1924, the International Machine became the standard cancellation in Cuba. It consisted of a place/date/time stamp on the left and seven wavy lines on the right across the stamp. Even after the advent of the slogan cancellations the International place/date/time stamp continued through the years of the Republic.
From 1911 until around 1917 it also included a single letter code to indicate how the piece of mail was being handled. The code was:
C = First received from a collection box.
D = Dropped off at the post office.
R = Received from another source.
T = In transit.
Little information of value was obtained using this coding system, so it was discontinued after a brief period. If you have further information on this coding system, please let me know.
Here are examples of each code:

08/31/2023

I find the collection of postal card varieties interesting. Here is a card from 1882. Because they were typeset with individual letters and spacing composing a block to be printed, there are small variations from one to the next. These cards were printed in blocks of 16, then cut. Accordingly, you can find and collect 16 variations. Reprinting year after year caused still more variations when a letter would break, for instance. So, in addition to the 16 variations there were what we call temporary variations.
In this example one sees a rounded “A” on ESPAÑA which happens to be the Type 12 variation. This was at least the fourth reprinting of this card and for some reason a raised period after ULTRAMAR appears for the first time giving rise to a T-4 temporary variation on the card.
For much more information on card variations, go to:
http://www.cubafil.org/MemberPages/RobertLittrell/PC/1880-82UPUvariations.html

01/25/2023

I have always liked Cinderellas. Here are a few. Please add to this if you have something interesting. And yes, I know the "Pro Calles" stamps are not Cinderellas, but unusual nevertheless.

01/25/2023

I have collected perfin postal patterns from Cuba for the past 15 years. During that time I have been able to find and collect only 5 of the Monroe & Co. (M/&CO) pattern thru thorough searching. The others that are quite scarce, only a handful in existence, are Acosta & Company (A&C) which was only recently identified by a one-of-a-kind cover, Enrique Armaignac (EA) of Santiago, José Llano (JLL), Odriozola y Cia (O&C) of Cienfuegos, Quinones Hardware Company (QHC) which was also only identified by a single cover. Then you get into the more common, but still hard to find patterns such as Armour & Co., Empresa Naviera, Frank Robins Co., New York Life and National Paper & Type Co. About the only common perfins here are National City Bank (NCB), Droguería Sarrá (SA/RRA) and Ricardo Veloso & Co. (RV/&/Co.)