The official line on the Taino story goes as follows: 

According to all of the standard anthropological, historical and enthnological accounts, the Taino peoples of the Greater Antilles became extinct as of the mid to late sixteenth century. Both the Eastern and Western Tainos - who had lived in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and parts of Haiti and Cuba for at least 1,700 years before the appearance of Columbus - eventually died out as a result of the genocidal wars of conquest, disease and suicide according to the standard research. 

These islands had been populated long before even the arrival of the Tainos. In Puerto Rico, for instance, the conventional scholarship asserts that Boriquen had been settled by approximately 1,000 B.C. so that the island that Columbus "discovered" had been the home of the Tainos and other tribes for close to 3,000 years. 

Although most Eurocentric scholars stand firmly behind their claim of extinction, they have acknowledged that there was a great deal of intermarriage between Tainos, Spaniards and eventually Africans. According to Irving Rouse, an internationally known anthropologist at Yale and author of The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (Yale University Press, 1992), the following statement summarizes the accepted mainstream academic belief: 

"...the census of 1514 found that 40 percent of the officially recognized wives of Spanish men were Indian. Consequently, a large proportion of the modern population of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba is able to claim partial descent from the Tainos...Even though the Tainos themselves are extinct, persons claiming Taino ancestry have survived in all three of the Spanish-speaking countries: the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba," Mr. Rouse asserts in The Tainos. 

Other noted scholars, including Dr. Ricardo Alegria of Puerto Rico, acknowledge the existence of accounts of Tainos and other subjugated groups escaping the Spanish overlords into the mountainous interior of the island. Although there is official recognition of these tales of escape, none of the mainstream academics went further than mentioning the possibility that the Tainos could have survived as a pure race for more than few decades after the late sixteenth century. 

But then there are those among us - including the author of these articles - who knew or saw pictures of older family members who did not look Spanish...Or to paraphrase the great Ismael Rivera, "Y de tu abuela?" 

Caribbean Amerindian Centrelink