10 most difficult Car­ib­bean riddles

Hispaniola is the second-largest island in the Caribbean (after Cuba). Its total population of 20M is shared almost equally between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The population of Hispaniola is about twice as large as the population of Cuba (11M).

It is known that Columbus arrived on an island in the Bahamas (he named it San Salvador), but for centuries historians debated on which island that really was. The captain's log doesn't give much information: large, beautiful island, with a lagoon. Today, there is a general consensus that it was an island in the Bahamas, named San Salvador in 1926 to match the name given by Columbus.

Jamaican Patois, known locally as Patois and called Jamaican Creole by linguists, is an English-based creole language with West African influences spoken primarily in Jamaica and the Jamaican diaspora.

Haile Selassie was born as Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael. As Governor of Harer, he became known as Ras Tafari Makonnen (Ras means Duke). Among the Rastafari movement, which began in Jamaica in 1930s, Haile Selassie is revered as the returned messiah of the Bible, God incarnate. Currently, the movement has between 200,000 and 800,000 followers worldwide.

Bermuda shorts were first introduced in Bermuda's business circle, when general managers of The Bank of Bermuda and Butterfield Bank were quite concerned that their male employees may not have appropriate attire to wear because of clothing shortages. They appointed a tailor to make shorts similar to what the British Navy and Army were using. Today, Bermuda businessmen wear ties, jackets and Bermuda shorts together.

Barbados is an island country situated in the Atlantic Ocean, east of the other West Indies Islands. Despite being classified as an Atlantic island, Barbados is considered to be a part of the Caribbean, where it is ranked as a leading tourist destination.

The pigs are said to have been dropped off on Big Major Cay by a group of sailors who wanted to come back and cook them. The sailors, though, never returned; the pigs survived on excess food dumped from passing ships. One other legend has it that the pigs were survivors of a shipwreck and managed to swim to shore, while another claims that the pigs had escaped from a nearby islet. The pigs are now fed by locals and tourists and the island is unofficially known as Pig Beach by the locals.

Georgetown is a city and the capital of Guyana, located in Region 4, which is also known as the Demerara-Mahaica region. It is the country's largest urban centre. It is situated on the Atlantic Ocean coast at the mouth of the Demerara River and it was nicknamed 'Garden City of the Caribbean.'

In 1952, Pierre Zurcher-Margolle, a dance teacher from London known as Monsieur Pierre, visited Cuba to find out how and what Cubans were dancing at the time. He brought cha-cha-cha to England and eventually created what is now known as ballroom cha-cha-cha. Typically it is danced to authentic Cuban music.

While the dominant language in Haiti is French, the Dominican Republic is Spanish-speaking. Both in terms of area and population (about 10 million), the Dominican Republic is the second largest Caribbean state after Cuba.