Rafaelito Román (Imbert, 15 November 1953 – Santiago, 6 December 2024) was a Dominican merengue típico accordionist, composer, arranger and teacher. He worked for more than fifty years, played eight instruments, and spent the last stretch of his life teaching the music to children.

Early years and formation

He was born into the instrument. His father, Ramón Román — Monguito — repaired accordions, played merengue, and founded and directed the Trío Bambú; he was a known musician in Puerto Plata in the middle of the last century. His mother, María Cabrera, called Gavina, played güira. The Dominican press gives his legal name as Ramón Rafael Ramos.

He was five when he started taking his father’s accordion, and by eight or nine he played it well.

The first trio

In 1968 he put together his first trio with two boys from his barrio, and played his first dance that year. It paid twenty pesos, split four ways.

The recordings

La Cañada and El Negro Feliz, both from 1970, were the first things he recorded. El Guabá he cut with the saxophonist Tavito Vásquez. La Aldaba, La Mecedora and El Pocotiao are his as well — he wrote what he played, which in típico is common and rarely credited.

The instruments

The accordion was the one he was known for, but he played saxophone, bandoneón, guitar, piano, bass, tambora and güira. That range is unusual even in a genre where musicians double, and it fed the arranging.

The school

He opened a school and ran it for years, teaching güira, accordion, tambora, saxophone and bass to young players. It was not a sideline: he treated passing the music on as part of the work, and a generation of típico musicians in the Cibao came through it. Among the accordionists he taught were his own sons, Raúl and Nixon Román.

Legacy

He drank from the two main sources of the genre — Tatico Henríquez and Bartolo Alvarado, the accordionist known as El Cieguito de Nagua — along with the Trío Reynoso, and came out with a style of his own rather than an imitation of either. That is the hard part in típico, where the repertoire and the instrumentation are fixed and the room to differ is narrow.

The other measure is who passed through his band. Agapito Pascual played tambora for him as a teenager in the late seventies, before switching to accordion and forming the conjunto he still leads. Between the band and the school, a good share of the Cibao’s típico players learned something from him.