San Juan is vibrant and industrial, filled with economy and color, and pleasant streets. Honolulu with dumpy billboards in Spanish. The restaurants in old San Juan - the smell of coffee and baked bread, roasted chicken and spice.
He drops us off at a taxi stand, where some other old guys in bright hats smile at us and say, "You like Puerto Rico, yes?"
We are walking in alleys painted orange and yellow and that Caribbean blue that is just a shade off turquoise and green. We are walking in Old San Juan, which is monuments and apartments, along a ridge lined by old turrets.
Old San Juan rests between two giant old fortresses. Construction began when the sugarcane was first planted. Dungeons and towers and dank tunnels.
Imagine a plant evolving to become so wanted that a giant sea fortress of four hundred cannon would be erected to protect its crop. Imagine a mad rush to protect a crop against the Carib Indians, who had a knack for destroying entire villages. Or the English and French, who had a knack for claiming them as their own. Imagine Puerto Rico as a kind of guardian to the Spanish Caribbean; its geography a stopgap to Cuba and Hispaniola. If you are sailing into the Spanish Caribbean, you have to pass San Juan.
The sugar industry was already swinging into full throttle in Puerto Rico just twenty-five years after Columbus' discovery. Puerto Rico and Cuba and Hispaniola and Jamaica. This was the Spanish Caribbean - the so-called Greater Antilles.
To Spain, the Antilles were a revenue source. And although European enthusiasm for nutmeg found the Caribbean, a new sweet tooth in Europe would fuel the development of the region. Entire islands would fell their forests for sugar. Barbados was bare. Tobago was skin. Antigua was bone.
Sugarcane demanded a labor force. The pope thought that if you could catholicize the Carib Indians, you could get them to stop eating each other, and become proper slaves. But none of the native populations were inclined, and Africa would quickly fill that bill. By choice or enslaved, the Antilles were brewing the makings of Americas. Sugarcane, in its humble pursuit of its own existence, was creating the West.
While sugarcane was beginning to bring massive payments into Spain's economy, the effect would go largely unnoticed for hundreds of years by the imperial crown. In 1728, King Philip V of Spain began looking into creative ways to shave more profit from the Antilles territories.
His answer was not gold or silver.
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