ABSTRACT
The Commonwealth of the Bahamas is an archipelago of some seven hundred islands and more than two thousand cays and rocks, situated in the Atlantic Ocean about 100 kilometers southeast of Florida. The archipelago stretches about 1,224 kilometers toward the northeastern coast of Cuba and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Only thirty of the islands of the Bahamas are inhabited, and more than 50 percent of the country’s 255,000 inhabitants live on New Providence, an island 11 kilometers wide and 34 kilometers long, on which Nassau, the country’s capital, is located. Except for New Providence and Grand Bahama, the inhabited islands of the Bahamas are known collectively as the Family Islands. Ninety percent of the country’s inhabitants are of African descent; the remaining population is primarily of European heritage.
