Haiti and the Dominican Republic: The History of a Divided Island

Anyone who spends even a few days in the Dominican Republic almost always falls in love with Dominican hospitality: open, warm people, ready to help a struggling tourist with nothing more than a smile. That's exactly why, sooner or later during a stay, many travelers are caught off guard by a detail that clashes with everything else: that same spontaneous warmth, when the conversation turns to Haitian workers or neighbors, can give way to a dismissive tone, jokes or unkind stereotypes. It isn't everyone's attitude — if anything, it's a fading phenomenon, especially among younger generations and in the cities — but it remains widespread enough to be noticeable, and to raise more than one question for an outside observer: why, exactly?

The short answer is that this attitude doesn't come from a spontaneous dislike between two neighboring peoples, but from a very specific history — partly colonial, partly engineered in the twentieth century by a dictatorial regime that needed it to consolidate its own power. To really understand it, you have to start with a geographic detail: Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince share a single island, Hispaniola, and despite centuries of forced proximity, Dominicans and Haitians have built two national identities that often eye each other with mutual suspicion. To understand why — and why, at the same time, the Dominican economy couldn't function without Haitian labor — you have to go back more than three centuries.

One Island, Two Colonies

Christopher Columbus lands on Hispaniola in 1492 and founds the first Spanish colony in the Americas there, with its capital in the city of Santo Domingo (founded in 1496-98 by Bartholomew Columbus, still the capital of the Dominican Republic today). For nearly two centuries the island remains under a single crown, but the western part, distant and poorly guarded from Madrid, is gradually occupied by French colonists and buccaneers. In 1697 the Treaty of Ryswick formalizes the split: Spain officially cedes the western third of the island to France, which founds the colony of Saint-Domingue there — not a city, but the name of the entire colony, whose capital would first be Cap-Français (until 1770) and then Port-au-Prince, today the capital of Haiti. From that moment the island is divided into two distinct colonial entities, separated by an internal border that runs largely along the mountain ranges and waterways of the interior — a line formalized only later, in 1777, by the Treaty of Aranjuez, and one that anticipates, in its placement, albeit still imprecisely, today's border between the two countries.

From here, two opposite economic trajectories emerge. Within a century, Saint-Domingue becomes the richest colony in the world, built on sugar and coffee plantations and on a slave system of enormous scale: on the eve of the revolution, the enslaved population of African origin far outnumbers the free population. Spanish Santo Domingo, by contrast, remains a poor, pastoral economy, with a proportionally much larger free mixed-race population. This asymmetry — wealth against poverty, plantation against ranching — is the first root of a mutual distrust that the following centuries would deepen.

1804: Haiti Is Born, History's Only Successful Slave Revolution

Between 1791 and 1804, the enslaved population of Saint-Domingue, led first by Toussaint Louverture and then by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, carries out the only slave revolution in modern history to end in the founding of an independent state: Haiti, proclaimed on January 1, 1804. It is an enormous event for the time — the second independent republic in the Americas, the first led by former slaves — one the colonial powers of the day, France above all, do not forgive: in 1825 France would go on to impose an independence debt on Haiti to "compensate" former slaveholders in exchange for diplomatic recognition, a financial burden that would weigh on the Haitian economy for over a century.

1822-1844: When the Island Was One Under Haiti

This is where the real historical root lies of an idea still circulating today: that the island is, by nature or by right, "a single country." On February 9, 1822, Haitian president Jean-Pierre Boyer enters Santo Domingo at the head of roughly 12,000 soldiers, meeting little resistance from the roughly 70,000 Dominican inhabitants of the time. He had, paradoxically, been invited by some Dominican border notables locked in struggles with their own political rivals; he was welcomed favorably above all by the Black and mixed-race population, who expected — and obtained — the abolition of slavery still in force in the eastern part of the island.

The occupation lasts 22 years, until 1844, and reorganizes the entire island into six unified administrative departments. Boyer's reasons weren't purely about power: there was a real fear of a French or Spanish reconquest that could restore slavery, and there was an ideology — inherited from Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines — holding that the island had to remain "one and indivisible" under a single government capable of defending it.

It's important to be precise on this point, because it's the heart of the misunderstanding that still fuels tensions today: that unification was a 22-year historical episode, not a present-day Haitian claim. The contemporary Haitian state has no official claim on Dominican territory, and historians who have studied the memory of that period — including historian Amelia Hintzen of the University of Miami — point out that the idea of a permanent Haitian threat to Dominican territory is above all a narrative built in the twentieth century for internal propaganda purposes, more than a current historical or political fact.

The Debt to France and the Collapse of Boyer's Government

So what pushed Dominican nationalists to rebel exactly in 1843-44? The answer again lies in Paris. In 1825 France agreed to recognize Haiti's independence, but at an enormous price: an indemnity of 150 million gold francs, meant to "compensate" former colonial owners for the loss of land and slaves — a sum equal to several times the young Haitian state's entire annual tax revenue, which Boyer accepted in order to head off a new French invasion. Reduced to 90 million in 1838, that sum remained unsustainable regardless: to pay it, Haiti had to take out loans from French banks at equally punishing rates, in what several historians have called a double debt.

To find the necessary resources, Boyer tightened taxation across the whole unified territory — including, therefore, the former Spanish eastern part — and imposed the so-called Rural Code, a system that effectively tied former slaves to the land and to plantation labor in order to revive the agricultural exports needed to repay the debt. The result was that the freedom promised by the abolition of slavery did not translate, for most of the population, into a real improvement in living conditions: restrictions on labor, higher taxes and no meaningful investment in education or services fueled widespread discontent, in both the western and eastern parts of the island. In 1843 this discontent erupted into an armed uprising in the south of Haiti, which on February 11, 1843 forced Boyer into exile; power passed to Charles Rivière-Hérard, but the new government remained weak and divided.

1844: Dominican Independence and a Border Contested for a Century

It's in this power vacuum that Dominican nationalists from the secret society La Trinitaria — Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, Matías Ramón Mella — seize the moment: on February 27, 1844 they proclaim independence in Santo Domingo. The Haitian troops, weakened by the crisis just endured and caught unprepared, withdraw without mounting organized resistance. The Dominican Republic is born.

Independence, however, brings neither immediate peace nor a defined border. For much of the nineteenth century, skirmishes, incursions and failed negotiations follow one another; the Dominican Republic, fearing a new Haitian attempt at reunification, even goes so far as to request a brief reannexation by Spain (1861-1865, the so-called War of Restoration) — an episode Haiti, never again under colonial rule since 1804, never experienced, and one that still today fuels differing narratives about which of the two peoples "fought harder" for its own sovereignty. The land border between the two countries remains undefined until the twentieth century: a first treaty fixes it only in 1929, refined by two subsequent agreements, on February 27, 1935 and March 9, 1936.

1937: The Parsley Massacre

It is just months after that last, seemingly conclusive border agreement that the darkest event in this story takes place. In October 1937, dictator Rafael Trujillo — in power since 1930 — orders the systematic killing of Haitian civilians in the border areas. Dominican soldiers identified Haitians by asking them to pronounce the Spanish word "perejil" (parsley): anyone who could not correctly pronounce the Spanish "r," betraying a Creole-speaking Haitian origin, was killed. Estimates of the death toll vary widely by source — from a few thousand up to 20,000-35,000 in the highest estimates — but the exact number remains a subject of historiographical debate to this day.

The fact that the massacre happened just after the diplomatic settling of the border is significant: it shows that the violence was not really about a territorial dispute, but a deliberate political project — what historians call the "Dominicanization of the frontier" — aimed at building a Dominican national identity defined in opposition to Haiti.

How Anti-Haitianism Became State Ideology

Trujillo, and after him his former collaborator Joaquín Balaguer (president multiple times into the 1990s), build through schooling, official historiography and state propaganda a narrative of Dominican identity as "Hispanic, Catholic and white," in contrast to a Haiti portrayed as "African and voodoo" — despite the fact that the Dominican population itself is, in large majority, of Afro-descendant ancestry. Balaguer codifies this view in the book La isla al revés ("The Island in Reverse," 1983) and, in 1996, uses it in an election campaign against candidate José Francisco Peña Gómez, insinuating alleged Haitian origins to discredit him.

Historians who have studied this phenomenon — termed "anti-Haitianism" — agree in describing it not as a spontaneous ethnic conflict between two peoples, but as a twentieth-century political construction, serving a specific project of power. This doesn't mean discrimination isn't real in everyday life: organizations such as Human Rights Watch and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have documented, for decades, concrete instances of discrimination against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent — a social phenomenon far from unanimous or uncontested, given that in the Dominican Republic there is no shortage of voices, journalists and activists (Dominicans included) who denounce it openly.

Today: An Economy That Depends on Those It Distrusts

The most visible paradox of the Dominican-Haitian relationship is found precisely in the economy. Around 200,000-250,000 people of Haitian origin live in the roughly 500 bateyes — the settlements that grew up around the sugarcane plantations — and Haitian workers are also present in large numbers in construction, agriculture and tourism: overall estimates of Haitian migrants in the country run as high as 500,000-700,000 people. As anthropologists who study these settlements observe, "without them the Dominican economy would be in serious trouble" — a paradox that has reached the point where even the checkpoints built along the border to contain migration were, in part, built by Haitian masons.

Political tensions nonetheless remain frequent. In 2013 the Dominican Constitutional Court, in the ruling known as TC 168-13, retroactively revoked citizenship from tens of thousands of people born in the Dominican Republic to undocumented Haitian parents, reaching back as far as 1929 — a measure described as discriminatory by Human Rights Watch and the Inter-American Court, and only partially corrected by a subsequent law. In 2021-2022 the government of President Luis Abinader began building a roughly 160-kilometer border wall; in 2023 a dispute over Haitian construction of an irrigation canal on the Masacre River led to a total border closure; and since 2024, waves of mass deportations have continued, while Haiti faces a security crisis tied to armed groups' control of the territory.

Two Peoples, One Island

The history of these three centuries tells a story more complex than a "natural" ethnic conflict. It tells of an initial colonial asymmetry, a 22-year occupation whose memory was later turned into myth by a dictatorship to construct an internal enemy, and an economic relationship of mutual dependence that still coexists today with real distrust and discrimination — though neither unanimous nor uncontested. Understanding these historical roots isn't about taking one side or the other: it's about reading, with greater awareness, a piece of Caribbean history that continues to be written, every day, on a single island shared by two peoples.

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