Most of Latin America was settled by the Spanish and Portuguese.  They intermarried with the local Indian tribes, producing mestizos.  They also imported many African slaves, and, in some cases, intermarried (or at least interbred) with them, producing mulattos.  All parts of Latin America have some mixture of these races.

*All parts of Latin America (except, of course, the English and Dutch parts) are heavily Roman Catholic, although some parts also mix Catholicism with native or African religions, one result of which is Voodoo.

*Most of Central America is a mixture of European, Indian, and mestizo races and cultures, as is most of the Latin Caribbean.

*Venezuela and Columbia tend to have higher percentages of African-descended peoples, and a greater percentage of mulatto people, but they also have many mestizo and European people as well.

*The Guyanas and most of the non-Hispanic Caribbean are mostly black, being descended primarily from African slaves.

*The Andean nations, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, as well as Paraguay, have very high proportions of mestizo and more or less pure-blood American Indians, although some of these nations, particularly Chile, have a small but influential European elite.

*Brazil is one of the most mixed of all Latin American nations, and, while the upper class remains mostly white and the favelas are still predominantly black, there is still a great deal of opportunity for people of all races and mixtures of races.

*Argentina and Uruguay are mostly European in background, partly because of a great deal of European immigration there in the 19th century (at much the same time that many people went to the USA).

*In some heavily Indian nations, Indian languages retain official status:  Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador place old Inca languages alongside Spanish.  Paraguay uses Guarani, the language of many of its pre-Columbian peoples.  Mexico and Guatemala recognise a number of Mayan languages, most notably Nahuatl. 

*Creole is a name given to mixed languages created by the merging of African, Indian, and European languages, and African-French Creole is a recognised language in Haiti, and other Creoles are used throughout the Caribbean.

*Football is the most popular sport in most of Latin America, although baseball is popular in many of the West Indies, and cricket is played in most of the current and the former British colonies in the region.

*1969 saw the Football War (or Soccer War) between El Salvador and Honduras.  As late as 1969, El Salvador still had a few large landowners and many small ones, and many poor Salvadorans had migrated to Honduras.  However, by this point, Honduras wanted to redistribute the land to Honduran peasants, and kicked the Salvadorans off the land.  Both nations were angry, and then, in 1969, a soccer game went bad.  In the run-up to the 1970 World Cup, El Salvador beat Honduras in overtime (in the tie-breaking game of a best-of-three set).  Riots immediately broke out.  The Hondurans accused the referees of cheating.  Within a few hours, there were armed skirmishes along the border between the two nations, and on 14 July 1969, El Salvador invaded Honduras.  It only stayed six days, but about 2,000 people were killed, and an official peace treaty was not drawn up until 1980 (and the boundary is still not entirely determined).

*Latin Americans share much of the same music and the same television (especially tellenovellas).

*Latin Americans love to party, and, as Catholics, many of their parties fall on religious holidays.  The most famous is Carnival, which takes place the week before Lent (sort of like Mardi Gras).  One of the largest Carnival celebrations is held in Rio de Janeiro.

*In 1898-1900, the US helped Cuba gain its independence from Spain, but at the cost of Cuba largely coming under the control of the USA (thanks in part to the Platt Amendment to Cuba’s constitution).  Some Cubans resented this, and between 1953 and 1959 Fidel Castro led a revolution to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, a US-supported dictator.

*After coming to power, Castro aligned himself with the Soviet Union, and the US has never forgiven Cuba for it (although our one attempt at invasion in 1961 failed at the Bay of Pigs).  Things were at their worst in 1962, when the Soviets moved short-range nuclear missiles into Cuba to threaten the USA.  The situation escalated nearly to the point of WWIII, but in the end, the USSR decided Castro was too dangerous to trust with missiles, and removed them (also, the USA removed missiles it had in Turkey).

*Most of Latin America became independent from Spain in the 1820s.  Throughout most of the 1800s and 1900s, Latin American nations tried to be democracies, but ended up with dictators or with small groups of military officers (called juntas) running the country.

*Recently, Latin America has seen many more democratic governments elected and maintained, and at the moment, only Cuba does not have a democratically elected government.