Caribbean

The Caribbean (Dutch: Cariben or Caraïben, or more commonly Antillen; French: Caraïbe or more commonly Antilles; Spanish: Caribe) is a region of the Americas consisting of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (most of which enclose the sea), and the surrounding coasts. The region is located southeast of North America, east of Central America, and to the north and west of South America.

For this wiki, we originally took the "Caribbean" to consist of the islands only, but including those beyond the actual Caribbean Sea - and to exclude the coasts (of Central America and South America).

However this is more restrictive than the political definition as defined by entities such as CARICOM which typically have the former UK and Dutch colonies on the coasts as members. We shall tend to adopt this approach when writing reports.

Note that all former components of the former Netherlands Antilles which are now "special municipalities" of the Netherlands (Saba etc) are still listed as if they were "countries" in the Caribbean - this is for ease of analysis especially by those not fully up to date with the complex changes in the last two years.

For entities within the Caribbean see Category:Caribbean.

VISCED

VISCED divides the Caribbean into three main subregions:

• Commonwealth LAC - which will have a regional report
• French/Dutch LAC - which will have a regional report, perhaps further subdivided into reports for French LAC and Dutch LAC
• a Spanish-speaking set of countries regarded as part of Hispanic America

However this misses out a few countries:

• Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands - US-influenced territories
• Haiti - a French-speaking country but not in the French LAC - interestingly now a member of CARICOM (along with Suriname from the Dutch LAC)

It makes more sense when we come to write world-spanning VISCED reports to try to include these within our section on "The Caribbean" but to exclude the Spanish-speaking countries.

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> South America
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