Santo Domingo: Five hundred years of bittersweet intertwining

In October 2011, a passenger ship arrived in Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. At that time, the country had not yet established diplomatic relations with China, and the social atmosphere was calm and distant. Despite a GDP growth of 4.5%, an unemployment rate exceeding 14%, nearly half of households are in poverty, and a homicide rate of 24.8 per 100000 people. As one of the northernmost cocoa growing belts in the world, the Siwao Valley in the north originated from the tradition of slave labor during the colonial period. The colonial old city preserves the historical relics of the earliest university and the first anti colonial preaching in the Americas. The local guide stated that the country is slowly improving, but structural problems still exist.