Sasha Turner writes:

“The age of exploration and expansion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ushered in views of the Caribbean as a wild and savage paradise whose natural fecundity allowed it to bear fruit without much labor, and whose fruitfulness was ripe for picking. Imbued with theories of the Enlightenment, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries invaders traveled to the Caribbean to tame, subdue, and cultivate the wilderness. And by the nineteenth century, as reason became a straitjacket that constrained passions, European Romantics sought out the Caribbean as a tropical retreat; its primitiveness promised to liberate primal desires.

“American intervention that accompanied the intrusion of its capital and racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reimagined, but reproduced what are now sustained images of the Caribbean and Caribbean people as a land of tranquil ease in service of Europeans and Americans….”

Source: Calculating the Cost of Hurricanes in the Caribbean – AAIHS