Dominica

Dominica is the Caribbean island that refused to be colonized—not once, but for three hundred years. When Christopher Columbus sighted it on a Sunday in November 1493 (naming it after the Latin for "Lord's Day"), the Kalinago people had already held the mountainous interior for a century. They would hold it for three more, repelling every Spanish, French, and British attempt at settlement with a ferocity that earned them the label "Caribs" and a reputation European colonizers couldn't overcome.

The Kalinago had arrived around 1400 CE from South America, displacing the earlier Arawak inhabitants. They called the island "Wai'tu kubuli"—"Tall is her body"—an apt description for a volcanic mass of mountains and rainforest offering few beachheads and countless ambush points. The terrain that made the island agriculturally challenging made it militarily defensible. While Spanish conquistadors extracted gold from Hispaniola and Jamaica, they found neither gold nor safe harbor in Dominica and moved on.

France claimed the island in 1635, but Kalinago attacks prevented permanent settlement for decades. In 1660, France and Britain agreed to leave Dominica and St. Vincent as "neutral" Carib territory—a remarkable concession to indigenous resistance. The truce held nominally until the Seven Years' War, when British forces under Andrew Rollo captured the island in 1761. The 1763 Treaty of Paris formally ceded Dominica to Britain, which established sugar plantations and imported thousands of enslaved Africans. The Kalinago, outnumbered and outgunned, retreated to the mountainous northeast. A 232-acre reserve was established in 1763; in 1903, British authorities formalized the Kalinago Territory on the Atlantic coast, where over 3,000 descendants still live today—the only surviving pre-Columbian Caribbean community.

Independence came in 1978, but geography constrained development. Mountains cover most of the 290 square miles; flat agricultural land is scarce. Bananas dominated the economy until preferential trade agreements with the European Union expired. Tourism offered an alternative, but Dominica lacked the beaches that draw mass tourism to Barbados or Jamaica. The island branded itself the "Nature Island," marketing volcanic hot springs, rainforest trails, and the Boiling Lake—the second-largest hot spring in the world—to ecotourists who value pristine wilderness over resort development.

Then came Hurricane Maria. On September 18, 2017, the Category 5 storm made direct landfall, the first of such intensity in the island's recorded history. It damaged 98% of building roofs. Damage totaled $931 million; losses added $382 million more—together equaling 226% of GDP in a single night. Thirty people died; infrastructure collapsed; the agricultural sector was devastated. For most small island nations, this would be terminal.

Dominica's response was to declare itself future-proof. Five days after Maria struck, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit stood before the UN General Assembly and announced that Dominica would become "the world's first climate-resilient nation." The Climate Resilience Act of 2018 created the Climate Resilience Execution Agency (CREAD). The 2020-2030 Climate Resilience and Recovery Plan set 20 targets: 90% of housing built or retrofitted to withstand Category 5 storms; communities self-sufficient for 14 days post-disaster; complete transition to renewable energy. The strategy resembles fire-adapted forests that evolved to regenerate after burning—designing not to prevent hurricanes but to ensure each causes less damage than the last.

Geothermal energy anchors the transformation. Dominica's volcanic geology enables the first Caribbean geothermal project in thirty years: a $27 million World Bank-funded plant in Roseau Valley. When operational, it will power 90% of homes and potentially export electricity to Guadeloupe and Martinique. From importing diesel to exporting electrons represents complete metabolic restructuring.

Through 2026, Dominica faces the arithmetic of resilience: the total cost is estimated at $2.8 billion—five times GDP. Citizenship-by-Investment revenues finance much of the reconstruction. Model-based estimates suggest returns on resilient investment outweigh costs long-term, though debt accumulates in the medium term. A population of 72,000 cannot absorb shocks that larger nations weather. But Dominica is betting that designing for survival beats hoping for luck—the same lesson the Kalinago taught European colonizers four centuries ago.