Famous West Indians in Sports and Entertainment

The Caribbean has produced more than its share of world-class cricketers, but “Master Blaster” Viv Richards is among the most renowned. Perhaps the finest batsman of his generation, Richards amassed staggering offensive numbers over nearly two decades of international play.

Elaine Potter Richardson adopted the nom de plume Jamaica Kincaid in the early 1970s. As a writer at The New Yorker, she penned pieces for the magazine’s The Talk of the Town column from 1978 to 1983. Her fiction, for which she is better known, is largely autobiographical in nature and recalls the struggles of life in her native Antigua.

An American citizen by (two months premature) birth, Sidney Poitier’s Bahamian parents had traveled to Miami from their farm on Cat Island to sell some of their produce when his mother went into labor. He grew up in The Bahamas, but he returned to the U.S. as a teenager. After serving with the U.S. Army during World War II, he joined the American Negro Theatre and made his Broadway debut in 1946. He soon established himself as a major presence on stage and screen, eschewing roles that had been based on crude, racist stereotypes. He was the first African American to win an Academy Award for best actor, for Lilies of the Field (1963).

Jean Rhys was born in Dominica to a Welsh father and a Creole mother. She moved to London when she was a teenager but soon relocated to Paris, where she joined the thriving expatriate art scene on the Left Bank. With the help of British novelist Ford Madox Ford, Rhys published her first collection of short stories, The Left Bank, in 1927. The book described, in semiautobiographical tone, the despair and alienation of life in post-World War I Europe as the continent moved inexorably toward an even greater conflict. She broke more than a quarter century of professional silence with Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a novel that chronicled the earlier life of the fictional character Antoinette Cosway, the mad first wife of Mr. Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

Fans of international cricket speak of Garfield Sobers in the same tones used for Babe Ruth in baseball and Michael Jordan in basketball. Sobers was dominant in all aspects of the game, and claims that he was the greatest all-around player in the history of Test (international) cricket have been met with little dissent. His record, set in 1958, of scoring 365 runs, not out, in a single innings stood for nearly 40 years, and he was brilliant as both a fielder and a bowler. He was knighted in 1975.

Robyn Rihanna Fenty won a recording contract with Def Jam records when she was just 16, and she adopted her middle name as her artistic cognomen (Swedish Europop sensation Robyn had a well-established claim to Fenty’s first name). Her early recordings featured unabashed Caribbean influences, but, under the tutelage of hip-hop titans such as Jay-Z, Timbaland, and Justin Timberlake, Rihanna’s sound soon shifted to a more mainstream, dancefloor-friendly R&B. Airwave-dominating singles such as “Umbrella” and “Only Girl (in the World)” propelled Rihanna to the top of the charts, and she scored her 10th number one Billboard hit at age 23, the youngest artist ever to reach that milestone.

The title “world’s fastest man” has changed hands many times since the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) began keeping records in 1912, but Usain Bolt made an indelible mark as the fastest human ever. When 15 years old, Bolt became the youngest-ever male world junior champion in any event when he captured the gold in the 200 meters. An injury shattered his chances at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, but, beginning in 2008, Bolt won gold medals in the 100-meter and 200-meter races in an unprecedented three straight Olympic Games.

Dubbed the “Pocket Rocket” for her 5-foot 3-inch height, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce dominated women’s sprinting in the late 2000s and the 2010s in much the same way her teammates Bolt and Asafa Powell ruled the men’s events. Groomed by Jamaica’s sporting culture, which elevates elite sprinters to superstar status, Fraser-Pryce burst onto the scene with a spectacular win in the 100 meters at the 2008 Olympic Games. She won gold again in 2012, becoming the third woman in history to repeat a win in the 100 meters.

Players from Latin America were once a novelty in Major League Baseball (MLB) in the United States, but by the early 21st century roughly a quarter of all players had come from countries or territories outside the U.S., mainly from Latin America. The Dominican Republic alone accounted for more than 10 percent of major leaguers, and Pedro Martínez was arguably the greatest Dominican player ever. Regarded as one of the best right-handed pitchers of all time, he won three Cy Young Awards, and his performance during the 2000 season is ranked among the most dominant ever by a pitcher. His statistics are all the more impressive given that they were amassed by a clean player during the peak of MLB’s performance-enhancing drug era. Martínez was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2015, his first year of eligibility.

Born in what was then the British colony of St. Kitts, Joan Armatrading’s family moved to Birmingham, England, when she was a child. She taught herself to play the guitar and the piano, and, by the time she was a teenager, she was performing her own compositions at local clubs. While appearing in the British touring production of the musical Hair, she met fellow Caribbean immigrant Pam Nestor, and the two collaborated on Whatever’s for Us (1972). Armatrading broke into the mainstream with the self-titled Joan Armatrading in 1976, and she quickly rose to prominence within the British singer-songwriter community. A string of critically acclaimed albums followed, and she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2001.

Nobel laureateV.S. Naipaul won accolades for his examinations of life in developing countries. His pessimistic take on the postcolonial experience earned him a Booker Prize for the short story collection In a Free State (1971), and his later works—both fiction and nonfiction—explored the relationship between Western colonizers and native populations in India, Africa, and the Caribbean. Naipaul’s personal life was laid bare in a pair of biographies, one authorized and one not, that painted a picture of a remote, eccentric, and, at times, cruel individual who harbored retrograde beliefs about some of his writing subjects. Nevertheless, Naipaul’s work remained significant within the body of postcolonial literature. He was knighted in 1989.

The father of Cuba’s “Queen of Salsa Music” had hoped that she would become a teacher, but a lifelong love of music led Celia Cruz to compete in a radio talent show, and her career trajectory changed abruptly. In 1950 the 25-year-old Cruz was named lead singer of La Sonora Matancera, the most popular orchestra in Cuba, and, in the years before the Cuban Revolution, she headlined at Havana’s legendary Tropicana nightclub. After the rise of Fidel Castro, Cruz and La Sonora Matancera left Cuba and eventually settled in New York City. She recorded several albums with “King of Mambo” Tito Puente and finally broke into the American mainstream in the 1970s. Cruz’s soaring vocals and eye-catching costumes made an indelible mark on the music scene, and her success was paralleled by that of salsa as a genre.