José Antonio Rodríguez, born in La Romana on 20 July 1954, is a Dominican singer-songwriter. He works in the canción de autor tradition — songs built to be listened to rather than danced to — and he is one of the few Dominican artists to have won a major international song festival and later run his country’s Ministry of Culture.

Para Quererte

In 1986 he took first place at the Viña del Mar International Song Festival in Chile with Para Quererte, sung by Maridalia Hernández. Viña del Mar was the largest stage in the Spanish-speaking world for that kind of song, and winning it put a Dominican composition at the front of a field that rarely looked towards the island for anything but merengue.

That is the pattern of his career: the songs travel under other people’s voices as often as his own.

The records

He has released seven albums at home, made with the country’s notable interpreters and arrangers. Una Más carries ten songs written by him. A Mi Tierra is the one other singers keep picking up, a song about the places and memories a person carries.

He recorded Déjame with the Cuban Pablo Milanés, which places him precisely: the Dominican in the room when Latin American nueva trova was being made.

The Ministry

He served as Minister of Culture of the Dominican Republic, leaving the post in August 2016. Songwriters in politics usually stop being songwriters; he did not.

He returned to recording afterwards and was still releasing new work in 2026. The through line across fifty years is a refusal to treat the song as a support for the dance floor — an unusual position to hold in a country whose musical exports are almost entirely rhythmic.