Cuba is more than twice the size of the Dominican Republic, but the Dominican Republic now has more people and a higher recorded income. Cuba covers about 110,860 km² on the CIA’s measure (109,884 km² officially), and its main island is the largest in the Caribbean, while the Dominican Republic covers 48,671 km² on the eastern two-thirds of Hispaniola, an island it shares with Haiti. Cuba’s statistics office estimated its population at about 9.43 million in 2025, after years of emigration and falling births, against about 11.5 million Dominicans in 2025. The IMF puts Dominican GDP per person at about US$12,600 for 2026; Cuba left the IMF in 1964, and the World Bank’s figure was about US$9,500 for 2020. The capitals are Havana and Santo Domingo, and both countries speak Spanish. Their histories ran in parallel for four centuries, then split sharply in 1959 and 1961.
Cuba and the Dominican Republic on One Timeline
| Period | Cuba | Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo) |
|---|---|---|
| Spanish arrival | Columbus reaches the north coast, 1492; Baracoa founded 1511 | La Navidad built on Hispaniola, 1492; Santo Domingo founded 1496–1498 |
| Capital founded | Havana 1514, moved to its present harbour by 1519; capital from 1552 | Santo Domingo, seat of the first Spanish colonial government in the Americas |
| 1697–1844 | Remains a Spanish colony; sugar boom after the Haitian Revolution | Western Hispaniola ceded to France 1697; French rule 1795–1809; Haitian rule 1822–1844 |
| Independence | Wars of 1868–1878 and 1895–1898; republic 20 May 1902 | Declared 27 February 1844 |
| Back under Spain | (still Spanish until 1898) | Annexed by Spain 1861–1865 |
| US occupation | 1898–1902, then the Platt Amendment until 1934 | 1916–1924, and intervention in 1965 |
| Dictatorship | Fulgencio Batista, 1952–1959 | Rafael Trujillo, 1930–1961 |
| The split | Revolution, 1 January 1959; one-party socialist state | Trujillo assassinated 30 May 1961; civil war and US intervention, 1965 |
Columbus’s Two Landfalls, 1492 to 1519
Both countries begin their written history on Columbus’s first voyage. In 1492 he sailed south from the Bahamas along the northeast coast of Cuba, which he took for a peninsula of Asia, and then along the north coast of Hispaniola, where the wreck of the Santa María was used to build the fort of La Navidad, in what is now Haiti. Both islands were home to Taíno peoples, and on both the conquest was catastrophic: after 25 years of Spanish occupation fewer than 50,000 Taíno survived in the Spanish-held parts of Hispaniola.
Hispaniola came first. Santo Domingo was settled from 1496 and formally from 5 August 1498 under Bartholomew Columbus, and it is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas. It held the first seat of Spanish colonial rule, and the first cathedral, university, monastery and fortress in the New World; the cathedral, built in the first half of the 16th century and completed in 1550, is the oldest still standing in the Americas. The Colonial Zone along the Río Ozama has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1990.
Cuba followed a few years behind. Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar became its first governor and founded Baracoa, the first capital, around 15 August 1511. He founded San Cristóbal de la Habana in 1514 on the south coast, but the swampy site failed, and by 1519 the town had moved to its present harbour on the north coast. That harbour proved decisive: Havana overtook Santiago, became the capital in 1552 and became the main stopping point for galleons returning to Spain. From then on Havana, not Santo Domingo, was the Spanish Caribbean’s key city.
1697 to 1844: Hispaniola Divided, Cuba Kept by Spain
The first great divergence came when Hispaniola was split. By the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, Spain recognised French control of the island’s western third, which became Saint-Domingue, the richest French colony in the West Indies and later Haiti. In 1795, by the Peace of Basel, Spain ceded its remaining part, Santo Domingo, to France. The east returned to Spain in 1809 and briefly declared itself independent in November 1821, but Haiti’s ruler Jean-Pierre Boyer annexed it in February 1822, and the whole island was governed from Port-au-Prince for 22 years. The secret society La Trinitaria, founded by Juan Pablo Duarte on 16 July 1838, led the break, and the Dominican Republic declared independence from Haiti on 27 February 1844. The war that followed lasted until 1856.
Cuba moved the opposite way. The collapse of Saint-Domingue’s plantations after 1791 opened the world sugar market, and Cuba filled it. It kept importing enslaved Africans long after Spain outlawed the trade for its subjects in 1817, did not stop until 1867, and did not abolish slavery until a royal decree of 7 October 1886. Production grew from 55,000 tons in 1820 to almost a million tons by 1895. While Santo Domingo was fighting for survival, Cuba was becoming Spain’s most valuable remaining colony, and Spain had every reason to hold it.
Máximo Gómez and the Wars of 1861 to 1898
The two histories crossed in one man. In 1861 the Dominican president Pedro Santana returned his country to Spanish rule and became its governor-general. The Restoration War of 1863 to 1865 drove the Spanish out again, and a young Dominican officer, Máximo Gómez, who had fought on the Spanish side, went into exile in Cuba. There he changed sides for good. When Cuban planters rose against Spain on 10 October 1868, beginning the Ten Years’ War, Gómez became one of their leading commanders, rising to major general, and when the poet and organiser José Martí launched the War of Independence on 24 February 1895, Gómez had organised the rising with him and landed alongside him at Playitas in April. Martí was killed at the Battle of Dos Ríos on 19 May 1895; Gómez survived to see Spain defeated.
That defeat came through outside intervention. The United States entered the war in 1898, and by the Treaty of Paris of 10 December 1898 Spain gave up sovereignty over Cuba. The island was then occupied by US troops until the republic was proclaimed on 20 May 1902.
Two American Occupations: Cuba from 1898, Santo Domingo from 1916
Both countries spent the early 20th century under close American supervision. Cuba’s constitution had to include the Platt Amendment, part of a US Army appropriations act of 1901, which let the United States intervene in Cuban affairs and required a lease of land for naval bases, the origin of the base at Guantánamo Bay. It was replaced by a new treaty on 29 May 1934, though the Guantánamo lease continued. US capital flowed into sugar, and when a speculative boom in sugar prices collapsed in 1920, American banks took over many defaulting Cuban mills. Havana’s Capitolio, built between 1926 and 1929 under President Gerardo Machado, belongs to this era of sugar money.
The Dominican Republic was occupied outright by the United States from 1916 to 1924, after years of debt and civil conflict. The Americans set up a Dominican army constabulary, trained by US Marines, and one of its officers, Rafael Trujillo, used that force to take power in August 1930.
Trujillo, Batista and the Break of 1959 to 1961
For three decades the two countries were governed by strongmen. Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination on 30 May 1961, a regime remembered above all for the Parsley massacre of October 1937, in which Haitians living along the northwestern frontier were killed in large numbers. In Cuba, Fulgencio Batista seized power in a coup in 1952 and ruled until the revolution led by Fidel Castro triumphed on 1 January 1959.
Here the parallel ends. Cuba became a one-party socialist state allied to the Soviet Union: the United States-backed Bay of Pigs landing failed in April 1961, and in January 1964 Cuba signed a deal to sell 24 million tons of sugar to the Soviet Union at a fixed price from 1965 to 1970, often around twice the world price. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Cuba lost that support and fell into the economic crisis of the Special Period, beginning in 1991. The Dominican Republic went through its own turmoil, as Juan Bosch, elected in 1962, was removed by a coup in 1963, and a civil war in Santo Domingo from 24 April to 3 September 1965 ended in a US-led intervention. From 1966, though, first under the authoritarian rule of Joaquín Balaguer and then under the governments that followed him, it kept a market economy and opened itself to foreign investment and visitors.
Beaches, Sugar and Emigration Since the 1990s
Both governments turned to tourism, with very different results. Cuba created a Ministry of Tourism in 1994 and invested more than US$3.5 billion in the tourist industry between 1990 and 2000, reaching over 4.7 million arrivals in 2018. Arrivals then fell: international tourism dropped 9.6 per cent in 2024, and early 2025 was down again by 29.1 per cent. The Dominican Republic received more than 10 million visitors in 2023, the most of any Caribbean country, and tourism provides about 11.6 per cent of its GDP.
The populations have diverged too. Cuba’s 2012 census counted about 11.2 million people, the first fall between two censuses in more than a century, and the official estimate fell to 9.75 million in 2024; with a median age of 39.5, Cuba now has the oldest population in the Americas. The Dominican Republic, growing steadily, passed it. The landscapes still set them apart as well: the Dominican Republic holds the highest peak in the Caribbean, Pico Duarte at 3,101 m, and Lake Enriquillo, the Caribbean’s largest lake, at 46 m below sea level, while Cuba’s highest point, Pico Turquino in the Sierra Maestra, reaches 1,974 m. For the colonial core of each capital, see our guides to Old Havana and Santo Domingo, and for the island the Dominican Republic shares, the Haiti and Dominican Republic comparison.