The Republic of Yara is an island nation in the Caribbean, with Esperanza serving as its capital. Yara was inhabited by the Taíno people before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, after which the Spanish massacred the native Tainos and executed their last chief, Apito-Bara, in 1512. The Taino were completely wiped out by the Spaniards, who filled the islands with African slaves as they cultivated tobacco and sugarcane on plantations. In 1702, the Spanish established Escila Fort to guard against rampant piracy as well as Portuguese and Dutch attacks. Yara was one of the Spanish Empire's last bastions of slavery, as well as one of its last possessions in the Americas. From 1893 to 1916, General Diego Caballero crushed several slave uprisings (including that of Iselda the Machete), and his brutal oppression of Yaran slaves resulted in total economic and political collapse. On 15 March 1916, Governor Geraldo Montano proclaimed Yaran independence, and Spain formally recognized Yaran independence in 1921. Yara became a prosperous nation, relying on the export of tobacco, sugar, and rum as well as tourism from North America and Europe. In 1957, Gabriel Castillo became President of Yara and presided over his country's zenith. However, this peace and prosperity was brought about through the brutal oppression of the country's peasantry, and the Soviet-backed professor Santos Espinosa overthrew and executed Castillo in the Revolution of 1967. Communist Yara immediately fell out of favor with the West and the United States due to the Cold War, even as the USSR and Cuba provided economic and military support. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Yara went into a freefall, experiencing major economic decline, political and social instability, and growing national debt. In 2019, Castillo's son Anton Castillo was elected President on a platform of reversing his country's economic woes and ending the American blockade, although the United States opposed his fascist regime as well. Castillo developed the Viviro cancer treatment from Yaran tobacco, using prison forced labor to produce the drug and punish his political and societal opponents, whom he deemed "Fake Yarans." The Yaran Revolution of 2021 saw leftist revolutionary groups once again seize power, killing Castillo and smashing his Fuerzas Nacionales de Defensa (FND) military, which was reduced to a persistent insurgency.
By 2021, Yara had a population of around 8.7 million people, most of them of mixed African and Spanish descent.
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