Given that people working on plantations would have been more exposed to mosquitoes than soldiers stationed in ports and towns (and that for every death two more people got seriously ill), it’s clear that agricultural laborers imported from Britain would have fared very badly in the Caribbean.
Still, it's strange that European sugarcane owners did not see this connection. If they had brought European workers (indentured servants even) the spread of disease would have been less or even nonexistant. While trasnporting European workers to the New World would haven been expensive, the survial rate would've been higher and likely producation of surgarcane would have been nearly as profitable.
