The Caribbean is a region of some thirty million people living in the islands stretching from the Bahamas to Trinidad, as well as the continental enclaves of French Guiana, Surinam, and Guyana. The continental coastal areas from Venezuela to Belize are also often thought of as Caribbean. Despite its great cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity, the Caribbean exhibits broad social and economic similarities born of its history of colonialism and slavery. The region is known for its tropical climate, beautiful beaches, and bright blue waters, but the Caribbean is also the birthplace of rum and a variety of popular cocktails. See Bacardi; Daiquiri; punch; Ribalaigua y Vert, Constante; and Sloppy Joe’s.
At the time of European contact, Carib Indians occupied the Caribbean from the Orinoco Delta region of mainland South America through the island chain of the Lesser Antilles, perhaps as far north as the eastern tip of Puerto Rico. The Caribs, as far as can be determined, knew fermentation but not distillation. Before the large-scale transition to sugar production, British, French, and Spanish colonists in the Caribbean experimented with the alcoholic potential of a variety of local plants, including plums, plantains, pineapples, and sweet potatoes. Christopher Columbus carried sugar cane to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493. Sugar production was a small cottage industry in some parts of the Spanish Caribbean in the sixteenth century, but there is no evidence that it was accompanied by distillation of the cane juice or the byproducts of sugar making. Instead, Spanish colonists and enslaved Africans used molasses and skimmings to produce a fermented drink called guarapo. It was in the British Caribbean colony of Barbados that cane spirits were first turned into an article of global commerce, when in the 1650s Barbadian sugar-planters began exporting the spirit they were distilling from sugar-waste (by then a common practice in the Caribbean and in Latin America) to the British colonies in North America and then to Europe. Today rum is made throughout the region in a great variety of styles.
See also rhum agricole; rum; and sugar cane.
Smith, Frederick H. The Archaeology of Alcohol and Drinking. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.
Smith, Frederick H. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.
By: Frederick H. Smith