By the middle of the 16th century, European colonizers claimed that 90% of the Taíno tribe had been wiped out due to enslavement, war, and disease. By 1787, a Spanish census in the Caribbean ...

(Gabriel Haslip-Viera) Within a century of the arrival of the Spanish, most of the Taino would have died of European diseases, and their land would have been shared out among the European conquerors.

The Europeans first used these people as labour on the plantations. Disease killed many of the Arawak and Taino people, and soon there were not enough indigenous people to meet the ever growing ...