Caribbean

• 1. Introduction

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  The Caribbean takes its name from the Caribs, an Amerindian people who lived in the Lesser Antilles and parts of adjacent South America. Spanish colonists named the region after them at the time of the European conquest. Today the word means many things at once. It points to a sea, to thousands of islands, and to coastlines stretching from the Yucatan Peninsula down through Central America to the Guianas. It is organized into 33 political entities, and it ranks among the most ethnically diverse regions on the planet. How did a single name come to cover such a sprawling, scattered geography? Who lived here before Columbus arrived in 1492, and what happened to them? Why do four European languages still share these waters, and why are Caribbean nations now reaching across the Atlantic toward Africa? The answers run through coral reefs, sugarcane fields, slave ships, and a deep ocean trench.

• 2. A Scattered Geography

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  Situated largely on the Caribbean plate, the region holds thousands of islands, islets, reefs, and cays. Island arcs trace the northern and eastern edges of the Caribbean Sea. The Greater Antilles sit to the north, and the Lesser Antilles run to the east and south, taking in the Leeward Islands, the Windward Islands, and the Leeward Antilles. Some places belong to the Caribbean without touching the Caribbean Sea at all. The Lucayan Archipelago, made up of The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, lies to the northwest. The island of Barbados, in the Lesser Antilles, is also counted in. Bermuda, by contrast, is not part of the Caribbean, since it lies in the Sargasso Sea to the north, though it is an associate member of the Caribbean Community. On the continental mainland, the Caribbean coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America join the picture. That includes the Bay Islands Department of Honduras, the Mosquitia region, Cartagena and Barranquilla in Colombia, and Maracaibo and Cumana in Venezuela. Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana do not border the Caribbean Sea, yet strong political and cultural ties pull them fully into the region. The terrain itself splits two ways. Islands like Aruba, Curacao, Barbados, and The Bahamas have relatively flat, non-volcanic ground. Others rise into rugged mountain ranges, among them Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Dominica, and Trinidad and Tobago. North of Puerto Rico lies the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest point in all of the Atlantic Ocean.

• 3. Before The Ships

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  The oldest evidence of humans in the Caribbean sits in southern Trinidad at Banwari Trace, where remains date back 7,000 years. These pre-ceramic sites belong to the Archaic age and have been termed Ortoiroid. Consistent dates of 3100 BC appear in Cuba, and the earliest dates in the Lesser Antilles reach back to 2000 BC in Antigua. A scarcity of pre-ceramic sites in the Windward Islands hints that these Archaic settlers may have come from Central America. DNA studies have reshaped the older story. According to National Geographic, pottery-making farmers known as Ceramic Age people set out in canoes from the northeastern coast of South America about 2,500 years ago and island-hopped across the Caribbean. They were not the first to arrive. On many islands they met foraging people who had come some 6,000 or 7,000 years earlier. The ceramicists, related to today's Arawak-speaking peoples, supplanted those earlier foragers, presumably through disease or violence. Between 400 BC and 200 BC the Saladoid culture, the first ceramic-using agriculturalists, entered Trinidad from South America and spread rapidly up the island chain. Later groups followed. Around 1300 AD the Mayoid entered Trinidad and stayed dominant until Spanish settlement. By the time of European contact, three major peoples held the islands. The Taino lived in the Greater Antilles, The Bahamas, and the Leeward Islands. The Island Caribs and Galibi lived in the Windward Islands, and the Ciboney lived in western Cuba. The population of the Caribbean is estimated to have been about 750,000 before that first contact.

• 4. Conquest And Bondage

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  Christopher Columbus arrived on the island of Hispaniola in 1492, and Portuguese and Spanish explorers soon began claiming territory across Central and South America. Colonial rivalries turned the Caribbean into a battleground for European wars over centuries. In 1512, after pressure from Dominican friars, the Spanish Crown introduced the Laws of Burgos to better protect the rights of the native peoples. The Spanish used a system of forced labor called the Encomienda, in which conquistadors were awarded laborers they were meant to protect and convert. The toll on the native population was devastating. Starting in 1503, enslaved people from Africa were imported to the colony. The trade had two phases. Portuguese and Spanish traders ran the First Atlantic System, and by the 17th century British, French, and Dutch merchants dominated the Second Atlantic System. Around 5 million enslaved Africans would be taken to the Caribbean, and roughly half were traded to the British Caribbean islands. Abolition came at different times for different empires. The Dutch Empire abolished slavery in 1814. Britain ended the slave trade in 1807 and slavery itself in 1833, and France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. Spain abolished slavery in its empire in 1811, but with exceptions, and slavery was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. Between 1640 and 1680 the region became known for piracy, and the term buccaneer is still used to describe a pirate operating in these waters.

• 5. Roads To Independence

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  In 1791 a slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue led, in 1804, to the founding of Haiti, the first republic in the Caribbean. Neighboring Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic, won its independence on three separate occasions, in 1821, 1844, and 1865. Cuba became independent in 1898 after American intervention during the Spanish-American war. Spain's last colony in the Americas, Puerto Rico, then became an unincorporated territory of the United States. Since the Monroe Doctrine in the 19th century, the United States has exerted a major influence over the region. The Banana Wars of the early 20th century brought temporary U.S. occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. A long wave of decolonization followed between the 1960s and 1980s. Jamaica led the way in 1962, joined that same year by Trinidad and Tobago. Then came Guyana and Barbados in 1966, The Bahamas in 1973, Grenada in 1974, and a run of others through Belize and Antigua and Barbuda in 1981 and St. Kitts and Nevis in 1983. The Dutch path ran differently. The Netherlands Antilles received autonomy within the Kingdom in 1954, Aruba gained its own in 1986, and Curacao and St. Maarten followed in 2010. During the Cold War, the United States again intervened militarily in Caribbean countries, including Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Grenada. The United States, Britain, France, and the Netherlands still hold some Caribbean possessions today.

• 6. Empires And Federations

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  From the 15th of December 1954 to the 10th of October 2010 there existed a territory called the Netherlands Antilles, made up of five Dutch dependencies. A second short-lived union also rose and fell. From the 3rd of January 1958 to the 31st of May 1962 the British West Indies Federation joined ten English-speaking territories, all then British dependencies. The independent countries that grew out of the former British West Indies still field a joint cricket team, the West Indian cricket team, which competes in Test matches, One Day Internationals, and Twenty20 Internationals. That team includes Guyana, the only former British colony on the mainland of South America. These same countries share the University of the West Indies as a regional entity, with main campuses in Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago, and a smaller campus in The Bahamas. The map of past empires runs wider still. There were Danish West Indies, now the United States Virgin Islands, and Swedish West Indies, including present-day French Saint-Barthelemy. Tobago alone passed through Courlander hands until 1691. Even Barbados has an unexpected chapter. It was known as Os Barbados in the 16th century, when the Portuguese claimed the island en route to Brazil, then left it abandoned years before the British arrived.

• 7. Living Mosaic

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  The modern Caribbean owes its diversity to European colonization by the Spanish, English, Dutch, and French, to the Atlantic slave trade from Africa, and to indentured servitude from the Indian subcontinent and East Asia. After European contact, epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles cut deeply into the Amerindian population, who had no natural immunity. The regional population is estimated to have reached 2.2 million by 1800. Immigrants from India, China, Indonesia, and other countries arrived in the mid-19th century as indentured servants. By 2000 the regional population was estimated at 37.5 million. Heritage varies sharply from island to island. In Haiti and much of the French, Anglophone, and Dutch Caribbean, the population is predominantly of African origin. On the Cayman Islands, Aruba, and Belize, mixed-race people form the majority. Indians form a plurality in Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Suriname, most descended from 19th-century indentured laborers. Cuba has a European majority alongside a significant population of African ancestry. Language follows the same braided history. Spanish is spoken by about 64%, French by about 25%, and English by about 14%, with Dutch, Haitian Creole, and Papiamento also among the official languages. Almost every Caribbean country has its own creole language or dialect that serves as the vernacular. Christianity is the predominant religion, at 84.7%, sitting beside Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Rastafari, and a long roster of Afro-American faiths. The kitchen tells the story too, from Barbados serving cou-cou and flying fish to Trinidad and Tobago serving doubles and bake and shark.

• 8. Reefs And Reach

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  The Caribbean islands hold one of the world's most diverse ecosystems, ranging from montane cloud forests to tropical rainforest to cactus scrublands. Conservation International counts the region's animals, fungi, and plants among its biodiversity hotspots. A checklist drawn from nearly 90,000 records names more than 11,250 species of fungi in the region, and that figure is far from complete. The arrival of the first humans correlates with the extinction of giant owls and dwarf ground sloths. Threatened animals today include the Puerto Rican amazon, two species of solenodon, and the Cuban crocodile. The waters carry their own riches and risks. The region contains about 8% of the world's coral reefs by surface area, home to about 70 species of hard corals and between 500 and 700 species of reef-associated fishes. A UNEP report warns that Caribbean coral reefs might go extinct within 20 years, driven by coastal population growth, overfishing, pollution, and global warming. The land's economy has shifted under these pressures. Tobacco was an important early crop before sugarcane overtook it as the staple, with Cuba and Barbados the largest historical producers of sugar. As export industries declined, tourism rose, growing rapidly in the 1960s when regular international flights made vacations affordable, and it is now a $50 billion industry. Regionalism grew alongside it. In 1973 the English-speaking nations created the Caribbean Common Market and Community, known as CARICOM, in Guyana. Now the region looks farther still. The African Union has called the Caribbean its potential Sixth Region, and in August 2023 the African Export-Import Bank opened its first Caribbean Community office in Barbados.