[10] As with the coastal areas of the mainland, Belize, Panama, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana are often completely included within the Caribbean due to their strong political and cultural ties with the region.

[19][20][21][22] According to the American version of Oxford Online Dictionaries, the stress on the second syllable is becoming more common in UK English and is increasingly considered "by some" to be more up to date and more "correct".

The Caribbean can also be expanded to include territories with strong cultural and historical connections to Africa, slavery, European colonisation and the plantation system.

A lack of pre-ceramic sites in the Windward Islands and differences in technology suggest that these Archaic settlers may have Central American origins.

According to National Geographic, "studies confirm that a wave of pottery-making farmers—known as Ceramic Age people—set out in canoes from the northeastern coast of South America starting some 2,500 years ago and island-hopped across the Caribbean.

Soon after Christopher Columbus came to the Caribbean including Hispaniola and Martinica, both Portuguese and Spanish explorers began claiming territories in Central and South America.

While early slave traders were Portuguese and Spanish, known as the First Atlantic System, by the 17th century the trade became dominated by British, French, and Dutch merchants.

Victory in the Spanish–American War and the signing of the Platt Amendment in 1901 ensured that the United States would have the right to interfere in Cuban political and economic affairs, militarily if necessary.

[39] The region sits in the line of several major shipping routes with the Panama Canal connecting the western Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean.

Warm, moist trade winds blow consistently from the east, creating both rain forest and semi arid climates across the region.

Arid climates are found along the extreme northern coast of Venezuela out to the islands including Aruba and Curaçao, as well as the northwestern tip of Yucatán.

The northern islands, like the Bahamas, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, may be influenced by continental masses during winter months, such as cold fronts.

The West Indian cricket team includes the South American nation of Guyana, the only former British colony on the mainland of that continent.

The animals, fungi and plants, and have been classified as one of Conservation International's biodiversity hotspots because of their exceptionally diverse terrestrial and marine ecosystems, ranging from montane cloud forests, to tropical rainforest, to cactus scrublands.

For the fungi, there is a modern checklist based on nearly 90,000 records derived from specimens in reference collections, published accounts and field observations.

[48] Though the amount of available information is still small, a first effort has been made to estimate the number of fungal species endemic to some Caribbean islands.

Examples of threatened animals include the Puerto Rican amazon, two species of solenodon (giant shrews) in Cuba and the Hispaniola island, and the Cuban crocodile.

[55] According to a UNEP report, the Caribbean coral reefs might go extinct in next 20 years due to human population explosion along the coast lines, overfishing, the pollution of coastal areas and global warming.

After contact, social disruption and epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles (to which they had no natural immunity)[62] led to a decline in the Amerindian population.

[citation needed] Immigrants from Britain, Italy, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Portugal and Denmark also arrived, although the mortality rate was high for both groups.

Puerto Rico has a mixed race majority with a mixture of European-African-Native American (tri-racial), and a large White and West African (black) minority.

The majority of Jamaica is of West African origin, in addition to a significant population of mixed racial background, and has minorities of Chinese, Europeans, Indians, Latinos, Jews, and Arabs.

Trinidad and Tobago has a multi-racial cosmopolitan society due to the arrivals of Africans, Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Jews, Latinos, and Europeans along with the native indigenous Amerindians population.

This multi-racial mix of the Caribbean has created sub-ethnicities that often straddle the boundaries of major ethnicities and include Mulatto-Creole, Mestizo, Pardo, Zambo, Dougla, Chindian, Afro-Asians, Eurasian, Cocoa panyols, and Asian Latinos.

Santería, Palo, Umbanda, Brujería, Hoodoo, Candomblé, Quimbanda, Orisha, Xangô de Recife, Xangô do Nordeste, Comfa, Espiritismo, Santo Daime, Obeah, Candomblé, Abakuá, Kumina, Winti, Sanse, Cuban Vodú, Dominican Vudú, Louisiana Voodoo, Haitian Vodou, and Vodun).

From a political and economic perspective, regionalism serves to make Caribbean states active participants in current international affairs through collective coalitions.

[clarification needed] The Lomé Convention, which allowed banana exports from the former colonies of the Group of African, Caribbean and Pacific states (ACP) to enter Europe cheaply, came into effect in 1976.

[82] Some Caribbean states have already moved to join Africa institutions including Barbados, Grenada, Guyana, and the Bahamas which have all became members of the African Export Import Bank.

The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez launched an economic group called the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA), which several eastern Caribbean islands joined.

Here are some of the bodies that several islands share in collaboration: Cricket is a very popular sport in the countries and dependencies that formed the British West Indies.