granca, I don't think it's entirely a culture thing - I think it's also a MONEY thing.
First, go to Jodetel and try to get a telephone in your house. Bad credit - you'll need to pay a deposit, and then wait until they decide to show up and install it (sometime in the future)....
Second, try living in a typical dominican house with your family - ALL of them, and everyone will want to use the telephone if you are not there, meaning a big bill at the end of the month for thousands of minutes of local calls everyone else made (hey, if you're not paying the bill, it's FREE right?) which you can't or wouldn't want to pay.
Third, if you lived in a small house/apartment with 8 or 10 other family members, would you stick around for much of anything other than showers or sleeping? I wouldn't want to. You would hit the road as soon as you could every day. Can't take the phone with you if it's a land line.
Fourth, cell phones are cheap and easy to get here in the DR. Almost free, and then all you have to do is punch in a new card for a few pesos to keep it going. Meanwhile, you can still receive calls for nothing. That's why almost all dominicans HAVE a cellphone - it's not that they are loaded, they just have their phone as a mobile.
Most dominicans don't HAVE internet service in their homes, which means they have to go to an internet cafe to send anything. Texting burns up their phone cards too. (I gave a niece a $300 phone card so I could make two calls, thinking I would be nice and it would last her the rest of the month. She immediately started texting with her friends, and burned the darn thing up in a few hours). Calling and leaving you a message to call them back burns up YOUR cell bill, not theirs.
Just one of those dominican things. Gotta love it, right? It's easier to adopt an attitude that if it was really imnportant, they would come looking for you, instead of just calling. Stop losing sleep over messages you can't get right away. Ask yourself, do you have the telephone for their convenience, OR YOURS? (dominicans or anybody else in this world)