Hey I want to apologize to everyone for my huge typo. Dominican Independence Day is On February 27, 1844. Not the 18th.

Go here for a history lesson.
http://www.consuladord-ny.org/Historia/history.htm

This is just brief but you get the idea.

"Now that Rufinito has made clear the problems of our independence, I am going to allow myself to speak of them to you. I believe that the concept of independence took root in Santo Domingo at the beginning of the 19th century, but was not made clear to the people or perfected until 1873. The first Independence was, without doubt, that of Nuñez de Caceres; not clearly conceived, perhaps, but independence to be sure. That of 1844 was conscientious and defined by the founders, but not for all the people, not even for certain leadership groups. To liberate ourselves from the Haitians was just and natural, but did all the people understand that we had to be completely independent? This is how we saw the annexation to Spain, and we know that, if for some this annexation was wrong from the start, for others it failed in its implementation; for these reasons they fought against the annexation. And the strange thing is, then, that not even this failure was enough to banish all thoughts of foreign intervention, and that the government of Baez was still thinking about the United States. Nevertheless by that time the idea had matured, the revolution of 1873 overthrew Baez, and not only Baez, but also his enemy Santana; overthrew, in sum, the regimen that prevailed during the first Republic, and banished definitively all ideas of annexation to a foreign country. This for me is the real meaning of November 25th; the work of this youthful, anonymous movement was to fix the consciousness of nationality.

Since then, the most grievous accusation that we can make to a government is to denounce it before the people as likely to diminish the national integrity; and it is noteworthy that until now that accusation in all cases seems to have been unfounded. The year 1873 signifies for Dominicans what the year 1867 means for Mexico the moment in which the process of understanding the idea of nationalism was completed.

Our period of Independence, and thereby, our process of moral independence, lasts, for me, from 1821 to 1873. During this half century, the most heroic moment, the apex, is 1844. However, that date must be considered as the middle, not as the beginning. The independence of the Republic as a fact, as a country, I believe, must date from 1821, although as an effective reality it did not exist until 1844, nor as a moral reality until 1873.

It is logical independence, for the countries of America, means independence from Europe, not from the other countries of America, although these have seen of races and customs so different from those or the people over whom they ruled (as happened in our case) that the domination seemed like tyranny. Surely I am not the only Dominican who has seen himself in this conflict when a Hispanic American asks us the date of our independence, we respond, naturally, 1844; but since the question is frequently asked whether Spain at that time still had battles in America, we have to explain that we had been separated from Spain since 1821; therefore, we declare tacitly that is the date of Dominican independence.

I do not claim, nor by any means affirm, that 1821 was our most glorious date. It is not: our symbolic date must always be that which the popular vote selected, the 27th of February, not because it was the beginning, but because it commemorates the most serious and most deeply thought out work, the most heroically realized (so much so that the people themselves did not understand it, according to that "Rufinito" of yours) in the fifty years that I have called "our period of independence."
(Passages from the letter of Pedro Henriquez Arena to Federico Garcia Godoy La Vega, Dominican Republic. Mexico,1909.)