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JAMAICA ♡

Jamaica is an island country in the Caribbean sea and the west Indies.  At 10,990 square kilometers, it is the third largest island after Cuba and Hispaniola of the Greater Antilles  and the Caribbean. Jamaica lies about 145 km south of Cuba, 191 km west of Hispaniola.

The indigenous Taíno peoples of the island gradually came under Spanish rule after the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1494. Many of the indigenous people either were killed or died of diseases, after which the Spanish brought large numbers of Africans to Jamaica as slaves. The island remained a possession of Spain, under the name Santiago, until 1655, when England (part of what would become the Kingdom of Great Britain) conquered it and named it Jamaica. It became an important part of the colonial British West Indies Under Britain's colonial rule, Jamaica came a leading sugar exporter, with a plantation economy dependent on continued importation of African slaves and their descendants. The British fully emancipated all slaves in 1838, and many freedmen chose to have subsistence farms rather than to work on plantations. Beginning in the 1840s, the British began using Chinese and lndian indentured labourers for plantation work. Jamaicans achieved independence from the United Kingdom on 6 August 1962.

With 2.8 million people, Jamaica is the third most populous Anglophone country in the Americas (after the United  States and Canada), and the fourth most populous country in the Caribbean. Kingston is the country's capital and largest city. Most Jamaicans are of Sub-Saharan African ancestry, with significant European, East Asian (primarily Chinese), India, Lebanese, and mixed-race minorities.^[Because of a high rate of emigration for work since the 1960s, there is a large Jamaica diaspora, particularly in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The country has a global influence that belies its small size; it was the birthplace of the Rastafari religion, reggae music (and such associated genres as dub, ska and dancehall), and it is internationally prominent in sports, including cricket, sprinting, and athletics. Jamaica has sometimes been considered the world's least populous cultural.