Carlos Manuel, billed as El Zafiro and sometimes as el diamante azul, is a Dominican merengue singer. He came out of the barrio of San Carlos in Santo Domingo and became one of the recognisable voices of the genre’s golden decade.

Heard in 1975

He started out singing ballads and boleros — that was the music he saw himself in. In 1975, still very young, he was heard by Bonny Cepeda, who took him on the spot.

Cepeda did that more than once. The orchestras of the seventies and eighties worked as a talent system, and a bandleader with an ear could change a young singer’s life in an afternoon.

Dominicano Ausente

In 1986 he sang Dominicano Ausente on El Show del Mediodía, and the record has stayed with people since. It is a song about the Dominican who is not here — the emigrant, the one the family talks about at Christmas — and it lands differently in a country that has sent so many of its people abroad.

El Cantante del Amor, No Sé Qué Hacer, Porque Tú Me Gustas, La Manzana, El Cheque and La Varita are the rest of what people ask for. 14 Éxitos gathered the run of them.

The orchestra and after

He worked under his own billing, El Zafiro Carlos Manuel y su Orquesta, through the eighties and nineties, and kept recording afterwards — Con el Alma came in 2018.

He announced his retirement in a long interview, going back over the moments he wanted remembered. Forty years is a full career in a genre that burns through singers quickly.