Old West Indian saying:

"Time is longer than rope."

(Time heals all wounds)

Nothing sums it up better than that.

The early history of the Caribbean 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's a brief overview that leads 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 Legacy . . . After the Caribs came Columbus. Were the Spanish all that different from the Caribs?

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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