Everything, in one place

All eighteen guides, filed by section

The complete roster. Five sections, from the rock underneath to the institutions built on top of it.

Three different things under one name

Islands that are pieces of continent	Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico are continental fragments rather than volcanic build-ups, which gives them size, rivers and real interiors.
A subduction zone that is still working	The Lesser Antilles are an active arc — Montserrat's Soufrière Hills from 1995 and St Vincent's La Soufrière in 2021 are the recent eruptions, both well documented.
A carbonate bank that is not really Caribbean	The Bahamas sit on a shallow carbonate platform in the Atlantic, with a geology and a water table completely unlike the arc.
Geothermal ground you can walk to	Dominica's Boiling Lake is a flooded fumarole reached on foot, and the island's geothermal potential is a live energy question.
Two plugs that became a listing	St Lucia's Pitons are volcanic plugs and carry a UNESCO listing that constrains what may be built around them.

The economy the land was made to serve

The crop that set the demography	The sugar plantation economy determined who was brought to each island and in what numbers, which is why the population map still reads as an economic map.
A trade dispute that reshaped island economies	The banana trade preferences and the WTO disputes of the 1990s removed the guaranteed market several small islands had been built around.
What replaces an export monoculture	Tourism, offshore services and remittances took the place of agriculture unevenly, and the islands that had mountains had more options.

A calendar of hazards

June to November, and the numbers are counted	The Atlantic season runs June to November with a documented climatology, and Hurricane Maria in 2017 remains the reference event for the eastern islands.
A weed influx that started in 2011	Sargassum inundations have arrived annually since 2011 from a newly persistent Atlantic belt, and they hit beach economies directly.
Coral events with dates on them	Bleaching events are recorded against sea-surface temperature anomalies, so the damage is dateable rather than general.
Flat islands import theirs	Limestone islands with no relief get little orographic rain and run on desalination, which sets the price of everything else.

The island that does not fit

An economy built on hydrocarbons	Trinidad and Tobago's economy runs on natural gas and petrochemicals, which makes it structurally unlike every island north of it.
A natural asphalt deposit that has been mined for centuries	La Brea's Pitch Lake is a natural asphalt seep that has been commercially worked since the colonial period and still is.
A civic event with a documented lineage	Trinidad Carnival's forms — calypso, steelpan, mas — have traceable origins in emancipation-era practice rather than in tourism.

What the region built for itself

A common market since 1973	CARICOM was established by the Treaty of Chaguaramas in 1973 and its record on free movement and a single market is mixed and documented.
Eight states, one central bank	The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank issues a currency shared by eight members and pegged to the US dollar, which fixes their monetary policy for them.
Islands that use the euro	Guadeloupe and Martinique are departments of France inside the EU, so the border and the currency in the middle of the arc are European ones.