Tony Seval — Felipe Antonio Sepúlveda Caraballo, born in La Romana on 5 February 1954 — was a Dominican merengue singer, composer and conguero. He was known in the trade as Kuky, he worked from 1970, and he was thirty-one when he died in police custody in 1985.

The conga on his shoulder

He moved to Santo Domingo as a teenager and learned the city’s concert halls from inside the bands rather than in front of them. The Fania All-Stars were his model. He played in the Orquesta de Juan Luis y sus Mulatos, then in the Típica Dominicana alongside Aníbal Bravo, Blas Durán and Bobby Rafael, where he was the conguero.

Around 1975 and 1976 people in Villas Agrícolas knew him by sight: the man walking through the barrio with his conga over his shoulder. He was an expert on the instrument before anyone thought of him as a singer.

Kuky Sabor y Son

At the end of 1978 he recorded for Radhamés Aracena’s Radio Guarachita label with his own group, Kuky Sabor y Son. It was his debut as a singer and as a leader, and La Dura was the song that took.

When merengue broke open in 1982 he worked the other side of the business too — percussionist for hire, promoter, contractor for the big orchestras of the moment.

Tony Seval y Los Gitanos

Early in 1984, backed by the Disco Mundo label, he formed Tony Seval y Los Gitanos and made a ten-track album, most of it his own writing. Zayda, Pa Bochinche, Gracias, Ton Din Don, Dame un Chance, La Maleta and Me Está Provocando came off it.

The record was called El Muerto. It went to the top of Dominican radio, his orchestra was booked across the country, and his band played the Show del Mediodía every Wednesday.

The arrest

On 22 October 1985 he was arrested and taken to the police station in Villa Francisca and then to the National Police headquarters, on an accusation of drug trafficking.

Reports of his treatment in custody led to a public denunciation of the arrest as illegal. The television producer Yaqui Núñez del Risco and the journalist Luis Eduardo Lora Iglesias, both of the Show del Mediodía, took up the case. Almost nobody was allowed near him.

He died on 24 October, two days after the arrest. The account given at the time was that he had been beaten by other prisoners in the cell he was held in. Nothing about it was ever established, and forty years on the Dominican press still marks the date as a death that was never explained.