The sugar industry is a major reason for Latin America's suffering over the past couple hundred years. The sugar crop requires tons of cultivation which means it requires tons of workers. To get the best profit out of this, slavery was adopted and became a huge reason for the success of the sugar business.
Another problem with sugar is it exhausts the soil. It's a weed that spreads and sucks all of the life out of the soil rendering it useless after the sugar has been harvested enough times. Also, to harvest sugar you need to burn it all down. These fires ended up spreading and killing many of the indigenous animals and plants.
2. What happened to the Caribbean islands? Why do you think Galeano began the section entitled, "The Devastation of the Caribbean," with Karl Marx quotation? What significance does it have?
The Caribbean Islands is an example of what went on in Latin America but to the extreme. Like the title of the section says, the land was devastated. What once was cotton, tobacco, oranges, cattle, and forests quickly got overrun by cane fields, there were mass amounts of slaves (over 80,000) and the soil was quickly becoming exhausted.
3. Does the beginning of this chapter give you any sort of new perspective on capitalism? If it makes you fell disenchanted with the whole notion, what would you propose to implement in its place?
Capitalism seems to always make a few people filthy rich, and many people very poor. It's based on a few powerful people exploiting the work of many in order to make themselves even richer. They will use some sort of method to keep the workers working for them until they literally worked to death.
I don't know much about politics and government but it seems like democracy works very well here in the United States so if I had the choice, i'd implement democracy to take the place of capitalism.
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