Caribbean History

The Basic Essentials

Old West Indian saying:

"Time is longer than rope."

(Time heals all wounds)

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Caribbean History
The Basic Essentials

Early Caribbean history deals with a lot of pain. If sugar cane hadn't become the region's dominant crop requiring massive amounts of slave labor, everything might have been very different.

Here is a brief overview leading up to today.

The First Inhabitants . . . They were the Ciboney, and no one knows where they came from. And then came the Arawaks and the Caribs.

The Columbus . . . After the Caribs came Columbus. Were the Spanish

Dividing Up The New World . . .The Spanish really didn't claim much of the Caribbean.

Pirates of the Caribbean . . . The Pope declared the New World to be Spanish territory. The rest of Europe disagreed. So-called "pirates" were after the gold that Spanish were stealing from the Indians.

Sugar & Slavery . . . If sugar, a crop imported to the New World, had never grown so well, black slaves might never have been needed.

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