and can exclude areas such as Barbados and the Turks and Caicos Islands which also do not technically touch the Caribbean Sea.

[3] During the Cold War, the then US President Ronald Reagan coined the term to define the region benefiting from his administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) economic program, approved in US law in 1983.

[4][5][1] As a result of this US foreign policy initiative, the term "Caribbean Basin" began to be used as a geographic description in the 1980s.

[6] Canadian historians and academics, Professor Graeme S. Mount and Professor Stephen Randall, citing historian Bruce B. Solnick, posits that: In the latter part of the 20th century, following the collapse of European colonialism, the Caribbean became "an American lake" which American hegemony seek to provide a form of unity in the region,[9] though the USA never saw itself as a Caribbean nation, nor did Venezuela until the 1970s.

"[10] The geographical area runs from the north in the Greater Antilles (such as Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico) to the west along the Caribbean coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico and the Caribbean coasts of Central America, continuing towards the east by the arc formed by the Lesser Antilles and to the south by the Caribbean coasts of Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela.