Jamaican History

Jamaica, a small, mountainous, tropical island slightly smaller than Connecticut, is located south of Cuba in the main shipping lane leading to the Panama Canal. Because of its warm, humid weather and beautiful landscape and seascape, Jamaica is a popular tourist destination. Owing to its strategic location between South America and North America, on the other hand, it is a popular transit station for drug dealers. Both of these elements, in modern times, have contributed to economic growth as well as to an increased crime rate. Jamaica is often advertised as a tropical paradise, but its history is strewn with hardship and violence.

The native Arawak were settled in what is now Jamaica around the year 700, many centuries before Christopher Columbus landed there. The Arawaks, a peaceful people, were all but wiped out by the end of the sixteenth century, owing to pressures caused by the...