Dominican Republic

From the Taino island of Quisqueya and Columbus's first colony to Santo Domingo, the first European city of the Americas, through Haitian unification, hard-won independence on 27 February 1844, the long shadow of Trujillo, and a modern tourism-and-services economy.

The Dominican Republic occupies the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, the island the Taino called Quisqueya, where Christopher Columbus made landfall in 1492 and the Spanish founded Santo Domingo, the oldest permanent European city in the Americas and seat of Spain's first New World power. After three centuries in which the island was divided between Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue, the colony experienced a brief Ephemeral Independence in 1821 before being unified with Haiti, and won its lasting independence from Haiti on 27 February 1844 under Juan Pablo Duarte and the secret society La Trinitaria. The turbulent century that followed brought a brief return to Spanish rule and the War of Restoration, a United States military occupation from 1916 to 1924, and the thirty-one-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, whose regime included the 1937 massacre of Haitians along the border. Since the 1965 U.S. intervention, the Balaguer years, and the transition to democracy, the country has grown into one of the strongest economies in Latin America and the Caribbean, driven by tourism, services, free-trade-zone manufacturing, and remittances.