What happened in the Caribbean world between 1500 and 1520?

Question

Take Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hispanola and the Yucantan Peninsula into consideration.

Answer 1

slave trading areas

Answer 2

Terrorists from Europe invaded, enslaved, and genocidally murdered the Indigenous populations of the Caribbean.

That's what happened.

Answer 3

Spanish carried off all 40.000 Lucayans to work in the gold mines, the pearl fisheries and plantations.

Answer 4

Various groups are found in the ethnic composition of the Caribbean but none is as demographically dominant as the one formed by people of African descent. They were brought to the West Indies as slaves to replace the Arawaks.

The context of the colonization of the West Indies by Spain contained, from the beginning, the political directive of using the Indians as a slave labor force to harvest the riches of the islands. The Arawaks, however, had a very high rate of mortality from suicide, back braking slave labor, massacres and the lack of immune resistance to European diseases like measles, influenza and small pox. One epidemic of small pox, for example, killed 200.000 Arawaks of Hispagnola in the early Fifteenhundreds. When the Arawaks inhabitants of an island disappeared, there was the possibility of replacing them by importing Indian labor from another island. One example of this system of replacement was the deportation of the Lucayans of the Bahamas. Between 1500 and 1520, the total Lucayan population which was about 40.000 was carried off to work in the gold mines, the pearl fisheries of other parts of the West Indies. The importation of the African slaves was less cost effective than the utilization of the local Arawaks population. It might not have been necessary, to introduce the African Slave in the Caribbean, if the the global ecosystem (the Arawaks included) were able to resist the biologic and political assault created by the Spanish, and keep providing the human labor force necessary to the harvesting of the goods/commodities that were shipped to Spain. When the Arawaks population started to disappear within a few years after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the lack of man power fermented the idea of the introduction of the African slaves. Gradually, the importation of the African Slaves, which, around the year 1502, was only a logistical alternative, became an operational necessity

The first group of African slaves were brought to the West Indies around 1503 in the Island of Hispagnola ( today Haiti and Dominican Republic) .
At that time, the Spanish colonist objected to their introduction in Hispagnola. They thought that the black slaves could corrupt the good nature of the Indians and push them into revolt. Through an interdiction from Charles V, the king of Spain, the importation of African slaves was stopped. However, because the Indian population was disappearing very fast and because of the persistent intervention of Friar Bartholomew de Las Cassas, the protector of the Indians, the Spanish king lifted the interdiction on the importation of the slaves to the West Indies. The importation resumed in 1517
At first, They were not taken directly from Africa but from the slave population of Spain. They were called the Ladinos.
The existence of African slaves in Spain and also in Portugal prior to their arrival in the New world makes us understand that the subsequent massive extraction of African people done during the slave trade was just a natural evolution of the relation between Europe and Africa. As a matter of fact, the triangle of historical events formed by the accidental discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus, the subjugation and elimination of the natives and their replacement by the Africans is better understood once one learns about the historical actions of Henry the navigator, Prince of Portugal.
Prince Henry dispatched several expeditions to Africa. He hoped to find a sea route to the Orient and also lots of gold. For centuries gold objects from sub-Saharan Africa had made their way to Europe. Some Portuguese even believed that the objects came from a "River of Gold."
In 1441, two of Henry's captains, Antam Gonclaves and Nuno Tristao, set out, separately, to Cape Bianco on the western coast of Africa. To the south of the Cape they came across a market run by black Muslims dressed in white robes and turbans. The two captains received a small amount of gold dust. The Portuguese crew also seized twelve black Africans to take back to Portugal, not as slaves, but as exhibits to show Prince Henry. (These would not be Portugal's first African slaves.)

The new captives included a local chief who spoke Arabic. The chief negotiated his own release, the terms of which were that if he and a boy from his family were taken back to their homeland and released, they would provide other black slaves in exchange.

In 1442, Antam Goncalves sailed back to Cape Bianco, then returned with more gold dust and ten black Africans. The following year, Portuguese explorers returned from Africa with nearly thirty slaves.

Within ten years, around 1453, thousands of slaves had been transported by sea to Portugal and the Portuguese Islands.
The voyage of Columbus which happened fifty years after the introduction of the African to Europe was part of the context of colonization of the rest of the world and its transformation, along with the natives, into a natural resource of Europe. Once we understanding this context, it becomes easy to realizes that the subjugation of the Indians was part of the central directive of the colonization, that their dispossession not only of themselves, as human beings, but also of their right on the land was part of the governing principle of the conquest and the subsequent bequeathal of the land of the New world to Spain by the Pope. The replacement of the Indians by the African was nothing but the replacement of one commodity/tool by another. The African was being transformed gradually into the human tool of the European. Wherever the European went, he brought his tool with him. If the local tools were efficient and resistant to the demands of the projected labor, the familiar tools were not necessary but if they happened not to be able to resist to the wear and tears of labor, or simply become useless, they would be replaced. It is therefore not an accident that once the Indians started showing signs of being useless as tools of the Spanish they were replaced by the familiar human tool of Europe, the African slave.
The first African slave was introduced to the Caribbean/America some 60 years after the first capture of an African by the Portugueses and only 11 years after Columbus landed somewhere in the Bahamas..

Answer 5

Exploring, conquering and slave trading.

Answer 6

European reconstruction.