Great Caribbean (El Gran Caribe) in world geopolitics, 15th-21st centuries 3305-WKSG-OG

The Spanish term "El Gran Caribe" has a cultural, economic, demographic, historical and geostrategic dimension. It began functioning in international relations in the 1970s. It is eagerly used by researchers of the subject because it takes into account the complexity of processes that took place in the region, including the Greater and Lesser Antilles, countries of Central America, northern coasts of South America, and the eastern coasts of Mexico and southern of USA. El Gran Caribe (Greater Caribbean) as a region was shaped by the clash of foreign economic interests, imperial political forces, but also transnational processes. These processes are the subject of the proposed Lecture, the primary aim of which is to present the complexity of the Caribbean region and its implications for contemporary international relations.
From Christopher Columbus' first expedition to America in October 1492, the Caribbean Sea became a strategic region for European colonization. In the first stage of this process, Spanish domination was clear, exploring the islands of the Greater and the Lesser Antilles and the Caribbean coast of Central and South America, and later also the Gulf of Mexico. The establishment of colonial settlements and administration in Hispaniola, Cuba and Panama allowed the Spaniards to lead the conquest north and south, where they encountered and conquered the developed American Aztec, Maya and Inca cultures.
The discovery of rich deposits of silver and gold on both American continents turned the Caribbean Sea into a strategic reservoir through which the riches of the Americas flowed to Spain and where European products, African slaves, as well as Asian goods were transported to America thanks to a navigation system called Galleon of Manila. Rapidly spreading information about American riches caught the attention of other European crowns, who began sending their privateers and pirates to plunder Spanish possessions and ships from the mid-16th century onwards. In the 17th century, the Greater Caribbean became an area of ​​the fight for colonial influence between Spain, the Netherlands, England and France. These non-Iberian countries, as well as Denmark and Sweden, managed to occupy some of the islands of the Lesser Antilles as well as Jamaica (the English) and the western part of Hispaniola (French). Subsequently, the aforementioned nations carried out pirate and buccaneer attacks on Spanish possessions and engaged in legal and illegal commercial activities, as well as developed a plantation economy using African slaves. In the 18th century, the Greater Caribbean region became a theatre of hostilities for three European maritime powers: Spain, France and Great Britain, where their imperial interests clashed.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the crisis of European absolutism began with the French Revolution. The echo of socio-political change reached the Caribbean Islands, leading to the outbreak of the First Independence War in Hispaniola, a conflict that was also a movement of Africans against the colonial system based on slavery. The creation of the first free state in America, Haiti, was the next step, in addition to the crisis of Spanish absolutism, towards the emancipation of Hispanoamerica from the metropolis. It was from Haiti that military campaigns in Colombia and Venezuela were supported and conducted.
The collapse of the Spanish empire in America, which kept only two possessions in the region: Cuba and Puerto Rico, accelerated the emergence of a new power on the geopolitical map of the Greater Caribbean: the United States of America (USA). They began to compete with Great Britain and France for economic, political, military and cultural influence in this strategic region. The "Monroe Doctrine" successfully limited European influence in Latin America. The only area where they are still strongly emphasized to this day are the Lesser Antilles, with 11 dependent territories. Central America, limiting Caribbean Sea basin from the west, due to its strategic location (between the South and the North and the East and West), became one of the main subject of the 19th and 20th century US economic and military expansion. The testimony to these activities are such mega-projects as the transpacific railroad in Panama, the Panama Canal and the Pan-American highway, but also the presence of the United Fruit Company.
The First World War was used by the USA to intervene and occupy some countries in the region such as Nicaragua (1912), Mexico (1914), Haiti (1914) and the Dominican Republic (1916) during the so-called Banana Wars (1898-1934), and World War II it brought transformation in international relations, also for the Caribbean.
The Cold War left a strong mark in this region where neoliberal and communist ideas clashed. Political coups d'etat, dictatorships, civil wars, and military interventions are only part of the effects. The present century (21st) brings new changes in the economic and political context, however, it leaves the Greater Caribbean as an important geostrategic area not only for the USA, but also for the European Union, Brazil, Venezuela and, above all, China.