Dominican Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dominican Republic holds both the tallest mountain peak in the Caribbean and its lowest point. Pico Duarte rises 3098 metres above sea level, and snow has been seen on its summit on rare occasions. Lake Enriquillo, a salt lake, lies 45 metres below sea level. In Santo Domingo, the capital, a Colonial Zone listed as a World Heritage Site holds the first cathedral, palace, monastery and fortress built in the Americas. Few places pack so much first-of-its-kind history into one country. This documentary asks who lived here before Europeans arrived and why the country changed hands so many times. It asks how one ruler dominated national life for three decades, and what followed him. It also asks what drives the nation's economy today, and who the Dominican people are.

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• 2. Island and Name

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  The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern five-eighths of Hispaniola, the second-largest island in the Greater Antilles. Haiti holds the rest, and the two countries divide the island at roughly a 2:1 ratio. Only one other Caribbean island, Saint Martin, is shared by two sovereign states. The land border between the two nations runs for 376 kilometres. To the east, across the Mona Passage, lies Puerto Rico.

  With 48,671 square kilometres, the country is the second largest in the Antilles after Cuba. It is also the second most populous there after Haiti, with approximately 11.4 million people in 2024. About 3.6 million of them live in the metropolitan area of Santo Domingo.

  The country's name comes from Saint Dominic, the patron saint of astronomers and founder of the Dominican Order. That order established the institution now called the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, the first university in the New World. Until independence, the colony was known simply as Santo Domingo, and English speakers kept using that name into the early 20th century. Its residents were called Dominicanos, and the revolutionaries who broke away chose la República Dominicana for their new state.

  The national anthem prefers a more poetic word, Quisqueyanos. Quisqueya comes from the Ciguayo language and means mother of the lands. Quisqueya is also one of two candidates for what the Taíno called the whole island, the other being Ayiti.

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• 3. Taíno, Columbus and Colony

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  Around 6,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers from Central America or northern South America first settled the islands of the Caribbean. The Arawakan-speaking ancestors of the Taíno followed from South America during the 1st millennium BCE. They reached Hispaniola by around 600 CE. They farmed, fished, hunted and gathered, and they made ceramic goods on a wide scale. Estimates of the island's population in 1492 range from tens of thousands to 2 million. By then it was divided into five Taíno chiefdoms.

  Christopher Columbus arrived on the 5th of December 1492, during the first of his four voyages. He claimed the land for the Crown of Castile and named it La Española, because its varied climate and terrain reminded him of Spain. In 1496, his brother Bartholomew built the city of Santo Domingo, the first permanent settlement of Western Europe in the New World. The Spaniards then built a plantation economy.

  The early relationship with the Taíno was friendly, but resistance followed. Anacaona of Xaragua and her ex-husband Caonabo of Maguana led the fight, alongside the chiefs Guacanagaríx, Guamá, Hatuey and Enriquillo. Enriquillo's successes won his people an autonomous enclave on the island.

  Disease did what arms could not. Smallpox, measles and other illnesses brought by Europeans cut the Taíno population sharply within a few years. African slaves were imported to replace them. The last record of pure Taínos in the country dates from 1864. Their biological heritage survived through intermixing, though. Census records from 1514 show that 40% of Spanish men in Santo Domingo were married to Taíno women.

  By the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain recognized French dominion over the western third of the island. The Spanish side then held a few thousand whites, about 30,000 black slaves and a few Taínos. By 1789 its population had grown to 125,000, yet it remained one of Spain's less wealthy colonies. The French colony of Saint-Domingue next door was far richer. Its half a million people were 90% enslaved, and it was four times as populous.

  In 1795, Spain lost the War of the Pyrenees and handed Santo Domingo to France by the Treaty of Basel. Saint-Domingue won independence as Haiti on the 1st of January 1804. In 1809, with the outbreak of the Peninsular War, the French were expelled from the island and Santo Domingo returned to Spanish rule.

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• 4. Independence and Occupation

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  On the 30th of November 1821, José Núñez de Cáceres, Santo Domingo's former Lieutenant-Governor, declared independence from the Spanish crown. His state, called Spanish Haiti, lasted two months. Haiti, led by Jean-Pierre Boyer, then occupied and annexed it. For twenty-two years Haiti ruled the territory as a colony, calling it Partie de l'Est. The unpaid Haitian army fed itself by taking resources from Dominicans without payment, and top administrative posts went to Haitian mulattoes.

  In 1838, Juan Pablo Duarte founded a secret society, La Trinitaria, which sought full independence without any foreign help. Francisco del Rosario Sánchez and Ramon Matias Mella were not founding members but proved decisive. Duarte, Mella and Sánchez are considered the Founding Fathers of the Dominican Republic. On the 27th of February 1844, La Trinitaria declared independence from Haiti, backed by Pedro Santana, a wealthy cattle rancher who became the army's general.

  The first constitution was adopted on the 6th of November 1844. Haiti invaded that March, but Dominican forces had defeated it on land and sea by the 15th of April. That July, followers urged Duarte to become president. He agreed only if free elections were held. Instead, Santana's forces took Santo Domingo on the 12th of July and declared Santana ruler. He jailed Mella, Duarte and Sánchez, and on the 27th of February 1845 he executed María Trinidad Sánchez, a heroine of La Trinitaria.

  Santana and his archrival Buenaventura Báez held power most of the time, and both ruled arbitrarily. Each promoted a plan to annex the young nation to a major power. In 1861, Santana asked Queen Isabella II of Spain to take the country back, and Spain agreed. The occupying force numbered 30,000 Spanish troops, joined by 12,000 Dominicans. The War of Restoration began on the 16th of August 1863 and killed more than 50,000 people. Spain withdrew in July 1865.

  Báez then turned to the United States. President Ulysses S. Grant wanted a naval base at Samaná and a place to resettle newly freed African Americans. The United States Senate defeated the treaty in 1870. In the 1880s, General Ulises Heureaux, nicknamed Lilís, brought relative calm. He also drove the nation deep into debt and kept a police state. He was assassinated in 1899.

  By the early 1900s the government was bankrupt, with a debt of $32 million that national revenues could not service. France, Germany and Italy threatened intervention. President Theodore Roosevelt wanted to keep Europeans out, largely to protect routes to the future Panama Canal. A 1905 agreement, extended by a 1906 deal lasting 50 years, put Dominican customs under United States administration. The customs revenue was the government's chief source of income.

  Instability returned after the assassination of President Ramón Cáceres in 1911. He had himself assassinated Heureaux. On the 7th of May 1916, President Juan Isidro Jimenes Pereyra resigned under pressure from his former Secretary of War, Desiderio Arias. President Woodrow Wilson ordered an occupation, and United States Marines landed on the 16th of May. Arias's men fought with trenches and old black-powder rifles, and the clashes were the first time Dominicans had ever met a machine gun. Santiago surrendered on the 5th of July.

  The military government, established on the 29th of November under Vice Admiral Harry Shepard Knapp, was widely repudiated by Dominicans. It nonetheless built a road network that connected every region for the first time. It also created a professional National Guard, and more than three hundred schools were established between 1918 and 1920. United States rule ended in October 1922. Horacio Vásquez won the March 1924 election and was inaugurated on the 13th of July. The last American forces left in September, leaving behind a National Guard that had trained a young officer named Rafael Trujillo.

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• 5. The Trujillo Era

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  Hurricane San Zenón devastated Santo Domingo in September 1930 and killed 8,000 people. That disaster helped General Rafael Trujillo consolidate the power he had seized in a military revolt against the Vásquez government. Early challengers fell quickly. General Cipriano Bencosme was killed near Puerto Plata that November, and General Desiderio Arias died in combat near Mao the following June.

  Trujillo's long, iron-fisted regime brought real economic growth, though a great deal of the wealth went to him and his circle. He built hospitals, clinics, schools, roads and harbors, ran a housing program and set up a pension plan. He negotiated an undisputed border with Haiti in 1935. In 1941 he ended the 50-year customs agreement, well before its expiry in 1956, and in 1947 he made the country debt-free.

  The price was absolute repression, with murder, torture and terror used against the opposition. From 1935, several Dominicans who took part in anti-Trujillo activities were assassinated in New York City. In 1956, his agents kidnapped Jesús Galíndez, a Columbia University lecturer, and flew him to the Dominican Republic, where he was apparently murdered. In early October 1937, on Trujillo's orders, Dominican troops killed between 15,000 and 35,000 Haitian men, women and children in the border region.

  In 1942, during the Battle of the Caribbean, German U-boats sank two Dominican-flagged merchant vessels, the San Rafael and the Presidente Trujillo. Four other ships crewed by Dominicans were also lost. The country sent no troops, but its sugar and other farm products supported the Allied war effort. A weapons factory at San Cristóbal produced rifles, machine guns and ammunition.

  Later, Trujillo formed a right-wing Foreign Legion of 3,000 mercenaries to try to topple Fidel Castro in Cuba. Major William Morgan pretended to lead the plot for Trujillo but was secretly a double agent for Castro. On the 13th of August 1959, a C-47 transport from the Dominican Republic landed at Trinidad airport in Cuba. Castro seized the aircraft and its ten occupants, and around 4,000 suspects were arrested across Cuba.

  On the 25th of November 1960, Trujillo's henchmen killed three of the four Mirabal sisters, nicknamed Las Mariposas, or The Butterflies. They and their husbands had been conspiring to overthrow him. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women is observed on the anniversary of their deaths.

  For a long time the United States and the Dominican elite had supported Trujillo despite the killings and plots. The break came in 1960, when his intelligence chief, Johnny Abbes, orchestrated a car-bomb attempt on Venezuelan president Rómulo Betancourt. For the first time in its history, the Organization of American States imposed sanctions on a member state, including an arms embargo. The United States severed diplomatic relations on the 26th of August 1960. President Dwight D. Eisenhower then drastically cut purchases of Dominican sugar, the country's major export, costing almost $22,000,000 in lost revenue.

  Dissidents concluded that assassination was the only certain way to remove him. On the 30th of May 1961, Trujillo was shot and killed during a car chase. The next day, Venezuela arrested several people plotting a coup with weapons traced to the Dominican Republic.

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• 6. Coups and Democracy

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  After the assassination, Ramfis Trujillo, the dictator's son, kept de facto control of the government for six months as commander of the armed forces. When Trujillo's brothers returned and a coup looked likely, United States Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned on the 18th of November 1961 that the United States would not "remain idle" if the family tried to "reassert dictatorial domination". A 14-vessel naval task force appeared within sight of Santo Domingo, and Ramfis and his uncles fled on the 19th of November. The OAS lifted its sanctions on the 4th of January 1962.

  Juan Bosch, a leftist, took office in February 1963 after a democratic election. A military coup overthrew him on the 25th of September. On the 24th of April 1965, a second coup ousted Donald Reid Cabral, the president the military had installed. Pro-Bosch Constitutionalists held most of the capital, where electricity, water and food supplies collapsed. By the 26th of April, around 5,000 armed civilians had joined 1,500 rebel military regulars.

  On the 28th of April, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent Marines from Guantanamo Bay to Santo Domingo, and United States forces eventually grew to 24,000 troops. A ceasefire was declared on the 5th of May. The OAS then set up an Inter-American Peace Force, to which Brazil sent 1,250 soldiers and Honduras 250. Nicaragua sent 164 soldiers, Paraguay 286, and Costa Rica 25 police. Foreign troops stayed over a year and left after supervising the 1966 election, won by Joaquín Balaguer.

  Balaguer had been Trujillo's last puppet-president, and he now ruled for 12 years. His tenure brought repression of human rights and a growing gap between rich and poor. It also brought an ambitious building program of housing projects, sports complexes, theaters, museums, aqueducts, roads and highways. The massive Columbus Lighthouse was completed in 1992, during a later term. In 1978, the opposition candidate Antonio Guzmán Fernández succeeded him.

  Hurricane David struck in August 1979, leaving upwards of 2,000 dead and 200,000 homeless. It caused over $1 billion in damage. Balaguer returned in 1986 and won again in 1990 and 1994. The 1994 vote was flawed and drew international pressure, so he scheduled a new contest for 1996 in which he did not run.

  In 1996, Leonel Fernández won the first victory for the Dominican Liberation Party, which Bosch had founded in 1973. Growth averaged 7.7% a year under him. Hipólito Mejía took power in 2000 in a time of economic troubles. Fernández won a third term in 2008, and Danilo Medina was elected in 2012 and re-elected in 2016. Protests against Medina's government erupted in 2020, and the opposition's Luis Abinader won, ending 16 years of Dominican Liberation Party rule. In May 2024, Abinader won a second term. In his victory speech he said the "changes that we've made are going to be irreversible" and that "the best is yet to come".

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• 7. Mountains, Valleys, Lakes

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  The Cordillera Central, the highest range in the entire West Indies, holds the four tallest peaks in the Caribbean. After Pico Duarte come La Pelona at 3094 metres, La Rucilla at 3049 and Pico Yaque at 2760. Farther north, the Cordillera Septentrional runs from Monte Cristi, near the Haitian border, to the Samaná Peninsula. In the southwest stand the Sierra de Neiba and the Sierra de Bahoruco. A major fault system, the Septentrional, marks where the North American and Caribbean plates meet beneath the country.

  Between the central and northern ranges lies the fertile Cibao valley. It is home to Santiago de los Caballeros and La Vega and to most of the nation's farming. The San Juan Valley to the south is semi-arid. The land around the Enriquillo Basin is hot, dry and desert-like, and much of it lies below sea level.

  The Yaque del Norte is the longest and most important Dominican river. It drains the Cibao and empties into Monte Cristi Bay. The Yuna River empties into Samaná Bay. The Artibonito, the longest river on all of Hispaniola, flows west into Haiti. Offshore, Saona in the southeast and Beata in the southwest are the two largest nearby islands. Navidad Bank and Silver Bank, submerged to the north, have been officially claimed by the country. Five terrestrial ecoregions are found here, including Hispaniolan pine forests and Greater Antilles mangroves.

  The climate varies over short distances more than anywhere else in the Antilles. The annual average temperature is 25 C, falling to 18 C at higher elevations and rising to 28 C near sea level. Mountain lows can reach 0 C, and protected valleys can reach 40 C. Average annual rainfall is 1500 mm countrywide, but parts of the Neiba Valley receive as little as 350 mm.

  Tropical cyclones strike every couple of years, mostly between June and October, with 65% of impacts along the southern coast. The last major one was Hurricane Georges in 1998. Bats make up 90% of the native land mammal species. Lake Enriquillo shelters the largest population of American crocodiles.

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• 8. Economy and People

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  Over 25 years, the Dominican Republic has had the fastest-growing economy in the Western Hemisphere. Real GDP grew by an average of 5.3% between 1992 and 2018. In 2014 and 2015, growth reached 7.3 and 7.0%. It now has the largest economy in the Caribbean and the seventh-largest in Latin America. For most of its history it depended on sugar, cocoa and coffee. Services now make up almost 60% of GDP and manufacturing 22%.

  The Pueblo Viejo mine is the world's third largest gold mine by production, and the country produced 31 metric tonnes of gold in 2015. It is also the most visited destination in the Caribbean. Remittances from the large diaspora, mostly in the United States, rose to US$4571.30 million in 2014 from US$3333 million in 2013.

  The collapse of Baninter, the country's second-largest commercial bank, followed a fraud valued at US$3.5 billion. GDP dropped 1% in 2003 and inflation ballooned past 27%. Child labor in coffee, rice, sugarcane and tomato industries remains a noted problem.

  In April 2013, the second line of the Santo Domingo Metro opened. The system is the most extensive metro in the insular Caribbean and Central America. Ridership grew from 30,856,515 passengers in 2012 to 61,270,054 in 2014.

  Surveys of Dominican ancestry point to a mix of three roots. For the founder population, DNA is estimated at 73% European, 10% Native and 17% African. Spanish is spoken nearly everywhere, but a few thousand people on the Samaná Peninsula descend from formerly enslaved African Americans who arrived in the nineteenth century and once spoke Samaná English. Today only a few elders speak it. In the late 19th century, Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians arrived and were locally called "Turks" because they carried Ottoman passports. Caribbean migrants from islands such as Antigua and St. Kitts and Nevis, known as Cocolos, settled around San Pedro de Macorís and Puerto Plata to work on sugarcane plantations and docks.

  During World War II, a group of Jews escaping Nazi Germany fled to the country and founded the city of Sosúa. It has remained the center of the Jewish population ever since.

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