West Indian poet and playwright Derek Walcott founds the Trinidad Theatre Workshop

An invasion force of about 1500 Cuban exiles comes ashore in Cuba's Bay of Pigs in an attempt to topple the Castro regime

Two days after landing in the Bay of Pigs, 114 Cuban exiles are dead and about 1300 have been captured

Caribbean novelist V.S. Naipaul features his Trinidad family in A House for Mr Biswas

Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic for the past 30 years, is killed by a machine-gun attack on his car

US intelligence reveals nuclear missile bases under construction in Cuba, causing an international crisis

President Kennedy sends the US navy to prevent delivery of Soviet missiles to Cuba

A deal between President Kennedy and Soviet premier Khrushchev defuses the Cuban missile crisis

Fidel Castro releases, for $53 million in food and medicine, the Cuban exiles taken prisoner in the Bay of Pigs fiasco

Bob Marley and five others form a band, the Wailers, that will for the first time give Jamaican music a global following

Papa Doc Duvalier, ruling through the brutal Tontons Macoutes, makes himself president of Haiti for life

US marines intervene in civil war in the Dominican Republic to prevent a communist takeover

Joaquin Balaguer, a close associate of Trujillo, is elected president of the Dominican Republic

The 19-year-old Jean Claude Duvalier, succeeding his father as president of Haiti, becomes known as Baby Doc

President Reagan sends US marines to Grenada after the execution of the island's prime minister, Maurice Bishop

Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid publishes her first novel, Annie John

Baby Doc Duvalier escapes from Haiti in a US airforce jet and goes into exile in France

A Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is elected president of Haiti and begins a programme of reform

West Indian author Derek Walcott publishes Omeros, an epic poem of the Caribbean

A military coup in Haiti ousts the reforming president Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Trinidadian cricketer Brian Lara sets a new world record, scoring 501 not out when playing for Warwickshire against Durham

The return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti, under UN protection, leads to a period of relative calm unusual in the republic

The US holds suspected al-Qaeda terrorists indefinitely, and without legal rights, in Guantanamo Bay, an American enclave in Cuba

For the second time president Jean-Bertrand Aristide is forced to flee from Haiti, after losing control to opposition rebels

The US Supreme Court rules that the military courts set up to try detainees in Guantanamo Bay are illegal