Sugar, sugar

1. On the secnd voyage, Columbus brings the first sugarcane roots from Canary Islands and plant them in Republica Dominicana. (sugar was grown on a small scale in Sicily, Madeira, The Cape Islands and the Canary Islands. Sugar was very important to Europeans)



2. Canefields were planted in Northeast Brazil(because it was warm and damp)and Caribbean islands -Barbados, Jamaica, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Guadeloupe, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Veracruz and the Peruvian coast.



Pinche "Latin American" maps on the internet didn't have Gaudeloupe there so I had to take a screen shot of my Google Earth, and STILL couldn't get Brazil, Mexico and Peru because whenever I zoomed out of Central America, Guadeloupe disappeared.



I like the way he says "pitifully" at 1:51.

3. The colonial plantation evolved directly into the present-day latifundio, resulting in the impoverishment of soil amongst many other social, environmental problems in Latin America.

4. in the 16th century, Brazil had 120 sugarmills worth some £2 million. but its masters imported all the food -> resulting in chronic malnutrition and misery for most of the population -> North Eastern children had to eat dirt to gain the mineral salts which were absent from their diet of manioic starch, beans, and tough, scarce meat.(The Brazilian Northeast is the most underdeveloped area in the Western hemisphere)


Eduardo Galeano - Open veins of Latin America.