BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY: BLACK PEOPLE WHO BUILT THE PANAMA CANAL, MOSTLY WEST INDIANS:

The Americans say that they built the Panama Canal, but the voices of 25,000 dead Black Labors say other wise. The bulk of labors on the projects were black Bajans. The failure to record the names of Black men and women who left the Island of Barbados for Panama will never be known. The human toll was conservatively estimated at 256.000 lives or 500 dead for every mile of the canal. The American claimed they built it because they paid for it, but the hard graft and all the laborers who dig the canal by hand were Black men from Barbados and Jamaica.

The number of men who never return to the Islands they left and never came back to may not have been recorded but most death were. Unknown is the amount of men and women from Barbados and Jamaica  who settled in Panama and raised families. You have a lot of dark skinned people in Panama whose ancestry are West Indians.