[1865 - 1916] The Second Republic

The year is 1865. The smoke has cleared over the battlefields of the Restoration War, and the last Spanish flags have been lowered from Dominican soil. A fragile sovereignty has been won, purchased with blood and sacrifice. But independence is not peace. The nation that emerges is a fractured land of deep valleys and rival towns, a place where loyalty is given not to a flag in Santo Domingo, but to the local strongman—the 'caudillo'—who promises protection and spoils. This period, the Second Republic, was born not into joyous celebration, but into a fifty-year storm of political violence, ambition, and foreign intrigue.

Two figures, and two colors, dominated the first decade. On one side stood Buenaventura Báez, leader of the “Rojos,” or Red Party. A wily, five-time president, Báez saw the nation’s salvation not in its own strength, but in its sale. He was convinced that only by becoming a territory of the United States could the Dominican Republic find stability and prosperity. His obsession with annexation was relentless. He schemed with American speculators and politicians, even managing to draft a treaty that would have sold the Samaná Bay for $150,000 and the entire country for $1.5 million. To finance his schemes, he took out a disastrous loan from a British financier named Edward Hartmont. The country was saddled with a debt of £420,000, yet received only about $37,000 in actual cash after commissions and fees were paid. It was a crippling blow from which the national treasury would never truly recover.

Opposing him were the “Azules,” the Blue Party, led by the hero of the Restoration War, General Gregorio Luperón. Where Báez was a cynical politician of the capital, Luperón was a nationalist firebrand from the northern port city of Puerto Plata. For Luperón and his followers, the idea of selling the country they had just fought to liberate was the ultimate betrayal. He waged a guerrilla war against Báez from the mountains, embodying the fierce, independent spirit of the 'cibaeño' farmer. When Báez was finally exiled for good in 1878, it was Luperón who established a provisional government in his hometown, ushering in a brief, hopeful period of liberal reforms, a new constitution, and a commitment to public education. It felt, for a moment, like the storm might finally break.

But the storm had a name, and it was Ulises Heureaux. Known to all as ‘Lilís,’ he was Luperón’s most brilliant and trusted general. Charming, intelligent, and utterly ruthless, Lilís had risen from humble beginnings in Puerto Plata. He possessed an uncanny ability to read people, to know their price, their weaknesses, and their fears. Luperón saw him as the future of the Blue Party and backed his rise to the presidency in 1882. It was a fatal miscalculation. Once in power, Lilís revealed his true nature. He consolidated his control with chilling efficiency, creating the most absolute and terrifying dictatorship the nation had ever known.

For seventeen years, Lilís was the Dominican state. He ruled through a sophisticated system of patronage and terror. A vast network of spies reported on every conversation in every town square. Political opponents were bought off with government contracts, exiled, or simply assassinated. He maintained two separate cabinets, one for the old Rojos and one for the Azules, masterfully playing them against each other. To the outside world, he projected an image of progress. With foreign loans, he funded the construction of the first railway, a single line connecting the fertile Cibao Valley to the port of Sánchez, built primarily to serve the booming tobacco and sugar industries. The telegraph and telephone arrived, but their wires served mainly to transmit Lilís’s orders and carry his spies’ reports, tightening his grip on the provinces.

The late 19th century was the era of “King Sugar.” American-owned corporations bought up vast tracts of land along the southern coast, building massive, modern sugar mills called 'ingenios'. The rhythmic clang of machinery and the sweet, cloying smell of boiling cane juice filled the air. These operations transformed the economy, but they also deepened social divisions. A new class of immigrant laborers, primarily black English-speakers from the British West Indies known as “Cocolos,” were brought in to cut the cane, creating new cultural tensions. Meanwhile, the traditional Dominican 'campesino' was pushed off his land, forced into wage labor or deeper into subsistence farming in the mountains. Life for the majority was a simple, arduous cycle tied to the land. Their homes were often simple 'bohíos' of palm thatch and wood, their clothes were of rough, unadorned cotton, and their diet consisted of the timeless trilogy: rice, beans, and plantains.

To fund his regime and lavish lifestyle, Lilís plunged the country into astronomical debt. He borrowed recklessly from European and American banks. When the cash ran out, he secretly printed millions of dollars in worthless paper currency—the infamous “papeletas de Lilís”—which he used to pay his soldiers and cronies, triggering rampant inflation that destroyed the savings of ordinary people. By the end of his rule, the national debt had exploded from a manageable $1.5 million to an impossible $32 million. He had mortgaged the country’s future to maintain his present.

By 1899, the nation was suffocating. The economy was in ruins, and the people lived in a state of quiet terror. The breaking point came in Moca, a town in the heart of the Cibao Valley, the same region that had resisted Báez’s treachery decades earlier. A group of young conspirators, whose families had been ruined by the dictator’s economic policies, planned his assassination. On July 26, 1899, as Lilís visited the town, a young man named Jacobo de Lara fired the first shot. The tyrant, the architect of a generation of fear, fell dead in the street. A wave of relief, not sorrow, swept the nation.

But the death of the dictator did not kill the dictatorship’s legacy. Lilís left behind a power vacuum and a bankrupt state. A chaotic succession of short-lived governments followed, each unable to control the regional caudillos or manage the catastrophic foreign debt. The United States, whose citizens and corporations held much of that debt, watched with growing impatience. In 1905, citing the risk of European intervention to collect their own debts, the U.S. government imposed a “modus vivendi,” taking control of the Dominican customs houses—the government’s primary source of revenue. This arrangement was formalized in the 1907 Dominican-American Convention, effectively seizing the country’s economic sovereignty. For the next decade, the Dominican government would function under the shadow of American financial control, a prelude to the darkness to come. The long storm of the Second Republic was ending, but it was giving way not to a clear sky, but to the looming thunderhead of direct foreign occupation.