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The Caribbean
A sea, an archipelago, and thirteen states that share a history
The Caribbean is a sea with a continent-sized reputation, and the islands strung along its rim make up one of the most politically fragmented regions on earth. Thirteen sovereign states sit here — Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Barbados, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines — alongside some seventeen dependencies still tied to Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States, Puerto Rico chief among them. Roughly 45 million people live on about 239,000 square kilometers of land, less than the area of Romania, scattered across an arc 4,000 kilometers long.
The Greater Antilles — Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Puerto Rico — are the big, mountainous islands of the northwest, thrown up by the collision of the Caribbean and North American plates; Pico Duarte in the Dominican Republic tops them at 3,098 meters. The Lesser Antilles curve south and east in a volcanic arc, small and steep, with live volcanoes on Montserrat and Saint Vincent. The Bahamas and the Caymans are low limestone banks with no relief at all. Coral reefs fringe most of it, and hurricanes cross it every summer and autumn, a hazard that has only grown more expensive as the sea warms and sea levels climb.
Columbus made landfall here in 1492, and within a century the Indigenous Taíno and Kalinago populations had collapsed. What replaced them was the plantation: sugar worked by enslaved Africans, on a scale that made the Caribbean the most valuable colonial real estate in the world and left the region overwhelmingly Afro-descended. Haiti's revolution created the first Black republic in 1804 and was punished with debt for a century. Independence arrived elsewhere mostly in the 1960s and 1970s. The modern economies run on tourism, offshore finance, remittances, and, in Trinidad, natural gas — and on a cultural export list, from reggae and calypso to Nobel-winning literature, wildly out of proportion to the population.