ABSTRACT
The British colonized the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua—the so-called Mosquito Coast—and the region’s culture is more closely associated with the Caribbean basin than the interior Hispanic cities of Managua, Leon, and Granada. As the demand for sugar grew and as profits from its cultivation increased, the Caribbean became a center of contention. A blessing and a curse, sugar left the Caribbean economies dependent on one or two agricultural products and created an ugly social structure in which wealthy Europeans and their administrators lived in regal tropical splendor on the same islands where the other people, mostly African slaves, barely survived. Florida and New Orleans belonged to the economies and culture of the Caribbean basin. Spain held Florida, as well as territory north of Mexico City and into Texas, up through present-day Arizona, New Mexico, California, Utah, and Colorado.
