The Caribbean region comprises not only the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, but the nations that border the Caribbean Sea on the west and south. In the 1980s, this combination of mainland and insular territories was referred to by American policymakers as the “Caribbean Basin.” Whatever label is used, the history of US relations with the region has been characterized by an oscillation between benign neglect and all-tooactive intervention.

The Caribbean region was a prime venue for US imperial ambition during the first third of the twentieth century Between 1898 and 1933, the United States acquired Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal zone, and occupied Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua. From 1933 to the end of the Second World War, the US eschewed military intervention in favor of supporting a series of client-states amenable to the free play of US economic interests.

The Cold War marked the advent of a new era of interventionism. During the 1950s and 1960s, the US put down nationalist ferment in Puerto Rico, helped overthrow a popularly elected leftist government in Guatemala and struggled to cope with the socialist regime brought to power by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Following the failure of covert military efforts to overthrow Castro’s regime, most notably at the Bay of Pigs, and the confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis, subsequent US policy aimed at the political and economic isolation of Cuba and the containment of revolutionary tendencies in other Caribbean societies. The Alliance for Progress program distributed considerable economic assistance to the former British colonies of the Lesser Antilles. In 1965 the United States invaded the Dominican Republic to prevent “another Cuba in the Caribbean.” A stabilized Caribbean emerged as a prime destination for North American tourists.

The United States’ informal Caribbean empire began to unravel in the 1970s. The Carter administration negotiated a treaty that would eventually return the Panama Canal to Panamanian sovereignty by the end of the century. Leftist regimes emerged in Guyana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Panama and, towards the end of the decade, in Nicaragua and Grenada. Together with leftist insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala, the US viewed these developments as the result of external machinations rather than internal processes.

During the 1980s, the Reagan and Bush administrations succeeded in overthrowing these regimes through military invasion (see Grenada and Panama) and by supporting internal rebels (the Nicaraguan contras), in addition to providing assistance to the Salvadoran and Guatemalan governments. Renewed military intervention was accompanied by the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which provided economic assistance in return for increased receptivity to investment by US-based corporations.

The end of the Cold War resulted in deep cuts in economic aid and a new era of benign neglect in US-Caribbean relations, save for an intensified economic embargo on Cuba.

Even so, the Caribbean is more closely tied to the United States than ever before, as millions of immigrants from the Caribbean region now reside in the United States, where they add to the complex socio-cultural diversity of the contemporary American landscape.