Mundito Espinal, born Rafael Edmundo Espinal Hernández, was a Dominican composer, journalist and broadcaster. He wrote around eighty songs and almost none of them are famous under his own name, which is the ordinary condition of a songwriter and was in his case very nearly the point.

New York and the return

He left the country at thirteen, with parents who opposed the Trujillo dictatorship, and grew up in New York, where he joined the Dominican Revolutionary Party and began announcing on radio at eighteen. He studied journalism there.

He came back in 1961, after the dictator was killed, to report on what was happening, and stayed. He directed a magazine for the air force, ran press offices, and wrote a column for years in one of the country’s political weeklies. The songwriting grew alongside all of that rather than instead of it.

The banned Christmas songs

The first person to record him was Julito Deschamps, in 1969, with two Christmas songs — Navidad del 69 and Aguinaldo 69. The public entertainment commission banned them.

The reason is audible in the opening line: the Christmasses are arriving, and my sad country receives them in pain. Espinal himself later said the lyrics were calls to rise against the government. A songwriter whose first two recorded works are seized by a censor has been told something useful about his own register, and he went on writing Christmas songs for the rest of his life — cheerful ones, mostly, which is its own kind of answer.

Who sang him

The merengues went to Johnny Ventura and his Combo Show: Sigo, Ah No Yo No Sé No, Llegó Navidad, Salsa Pa’ Tu Lechón and Llegó Nochebuena Otra Vez. Those are the ones the country still plays every December, and most people who can sing them could not name the man who wrote them.

The romantic songs went elsewhere. Fausto Rey had hits with Moriré Sin Ti, No Me Busques, Dime and Qué Triste. Anthony Ríos recorded Viejo Amigo and Nada. Charytin made Dime her own before Rey did. Luisito Martí took El Vestido, Fernando Villalona took Mayra, and Fernando Casado took Piénsalo and La Noche Está Triste.

In 1970 he came second as a composer at the Miami song festival, with a piece arranged by Rafael Solano and sung by Fernando Casado. That combination — his words, Solano’s arrangement, Casado’s voice — is about as concentrated a sample of Dominican popular song of the period as exists.

De todo un poco

The programme that made him a household presence was not musical. De todo un poco began on radio in 1971, moved to television in 1987, and he kept it running on one channel or another until the end of his life, presenting it with Milagros García Franco.

That is the shape of the career: a broadcaster whom the whole country watched, who happened to have written a large part of what it was listening to. The critics’ association dedicated a gala to him a couple of years before he died. He was eighty when he died, in 2015.