You create - mistakenly - a monoculture of one species.
Now, with the entire Antilles using essentially the same crop as their one financial crop, one single disease could bring everything down. And, eventually, that would happen.
But sugarcane would suffer two more setbacks. The sweetness of sugar became synonymous with the foul word slavery, and much of Europe began refusing it in protest. And soon after that, man engineered a way to extract the same sugar from beet plants.
Beets grew in Europe. No overseas shipping. No slavery.
The Spanish Caribbean was in jeopardy, but the English were already in cahoots with the sugarcane on an entirely new venture.
The race for Caribbean revenue was becoming more and more a race to utilize an understanding of the botany and commercial value of more specific uses of plants. Monoculture's failure was bringing the Spanish botanists together, here in San Juan, to use science to exploit botany - to engineer new species from cross-pollinations of the world's hundreds of sugarcane variations.
We stop in some back alley restaurant, for fried bananas. For plantains, black beans and pork. This will be our meal, but it will also be the future of the Caribbean.
