The Melding Americas : The Caribbean : Life in America’s Back Yard : No other region in the hemisphere has been more subject to the whims and desires of the northern giant. But influence came with a price, which was often war.

With an estimated 15,000 U.S. troops in Haiti today, following the footsteps of thousands of others deployed in the Caribbean throughout this century, there’s little doubt what Washington considers the United States’ back yard.

When Latin America was still looking to Europe for its language, its culture and its trade, the Caribbean was already an American sea. Sometimes it has been overwhelmed by soldiers, other times by tourists, always by economic power.

Dating to the colonial days of the Triangle Trade in slaves and rum, and reaching up to last week’s occupation of Haiti and the continuing crisis of Cuban migration, no other region in the hemisphere has been more subject to the whims and desires of the northern giant.

And no foreign power, including colonial rulers in Spain, France, Britain and the Netherlands, has matched U.S. influence there over time.

Today the price of sugar, the area’s major cash crop, is determined by U.S. subsidy policies. The strength of the struggling textile industry is effectively set by U.S. import controls. Even a mild winter in the northeastern United States can play a role, affecting nations dependent on tourism.

And while Spanish and old-country-accented English are the predominant official languages of the Caribbean, and regional music retains the combined rhythms of Spain and Africa, what is heard on nearly every Caribbean street corner is the slang and rock of the United States.

Hollywood movies dominate the theaters, and U.S. soap operas play on cable TV. Cricket survives in the West Indies, but it’s baseball that drives Cuba and the Dominican Republic.

The cultural influence has a small mirror image in the United States, at least on the East Coast. Jamaican jerked pork and chicken washed down by Jamaican Red Stripe beer are the fast foods of choice in large sections of New York and Miami, while Jamaican gangs often play a major role in the criminal scene of both cities.

An estimated 10% of Antigua’s population lives in the United States, along with more than a million Cubans, several hundred thousand Haitians and a like number of Dominicans. The Spanish so frequently heard in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and as far west as Chicago is usually fast-spoken, with the clipped sound of the Dominican Republic.

In the Caribbean, U.S. influence is largely a function of distance. Some islands are only 15 minutes by air from the U.S. mainland, and none is more than three hours from Miami. “I may prefer an English-cut jacket,” said Bahamian businessman Reginald Conners, “but as a practical matter what I get is something sewn in the United States.”

The Caribbean as part and parcel of the U.S. realm of influence did not come easily; the price in many cases was war.

All of the islands were at one time or another European colonies--of Spain and England primarily, but also of the Netherlands and France. But even in the colonial era, the United States never ceded the sea to Europe, and certainly not to the islands themselves.

Under the Monroe Doctrine and the later assertion of Manifest Destiny, the Caribbean was seen always as a major part of the U.S. sphere of influence in the hemisphere, an approach that still drives Washington policy.

U.S. yearnings for Cuba go back at least to the early 19th Century. Southern slaveholding states made the annexation of Cuba a presidential campaign issue in 1848. And after the Civil War, President Ulysses S. Grant made acquisition of not only Cuba but the Dominican Republic a key but doomed part of his foreign policy.

But if the United States couldn’t own the Caribbean, it certainly could reign. Washington made do with economic and indirect military dominance. Then, in 1898 and the Spanish-American War, Spain’s Caribbean empire crumbled and the United States held unhindered sway.

Since then the United States has gone well past merely exercising influence. U.S. troops have occupied Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Grenada, all in this century, sometimes staying for decades.

Now they’re in Haiti again. As assistant secretary of the Navy in 1919, Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote the Haitian constitution. The overwhelming presence of U.S. banks and the growing number of U.S. tourists have made the U.S. dollar the country’s predominant currency, preferred over the gourde, the local money.

In some cases, occupation became annexation, the acquisition of Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War the most notable example. At times, possession was more benign, such as the purchase of the American Virgin Islands from Britain.

U.S. influence was heightened in this century by British decolonization and the advent of jet travel, which has made the sea an American pond.

The Caribbean, sometimes wistfully called a continent of islands, ultimately had no power, internal or external, to prevent being swamped.