Cuto Estévez —full name Enrique Elías Elisio Estévez Pacheco, born in Moca on 24 November 1915, died in El Seibo on 30 September 1985— was a Dominican trumpeter, bandleader and composer, best remembered for the bolero «Todo Me Gusta de Ti».

Orphaned by the dictatorship

His father, Elisio Estévez, is documented as the first person killed on Rafael Trujillo’s orders, shot at Moca’s Restaurante Ideal on 26 March 1930, days after Trujillo’s coup against president Horacio Vásquez — leaving Cuto orphaned at fifteen. He had already shown an inclination for music, and went on to study theory and trumpet at Tilo Rojas’s Academia de Música.

«Billo’s Caracas Boys»

By twenty-two he was a standout trumpeter in «Billo’s Happy Boys», founded by the Dominican musician Billo Frómeta. The orchestra left for Venezuela in December 1937 and established itself there as the now-legendary «Billo’s Caracas Boys»; in Caracas, Estévez appeared in radio broadcasts and in Venezuela’s first sound film, «Taboga». His family believes it was there that he wrote «Todo Me Gusta de Ti», inspired by the girlfriend who had come to visit him.

«Todo Me Gusta de Ti»

Back in the Dominican Republic, a December 1954 letter — referred by his friend Alberto Beltrán and kept by Estévez for the rest of his life — proposed recording the song with Cuba’s La Sonora Matancera. Beltrán recorded it with the Cuban orchestra, the same pairing behind «El Negrito del Batey», turning it into one of the most internationally successful Dominican boleros of its era. It has since been cited in anthologies of the Dominican bolero, selected for institutional tributes including the 1981 fortieth-anniversary Banco de Reservas homage and the 2005 «Cien Canciones Dominicanas de Mayor Trascendencia», recorded by Joseíto Mateo, Trío Martino, Luchy Vicioso and Fernando Villalona, turned into a merengue by Wilfrido Vargas in 1984, and featured in the film «La Fiesta del Chivo», based on the Mario Vargas Llosa novel about the same dictatorship that killed his father. In 2024 Moca’s municipal government declared Estévez a musical icon of the city.

Legacy

Estévez led municipal bands in Castillo, La Romana and El Seibo, where the town’s music academy now bears his name, and worked as a music educator in the country’s eastern region, training talents including the pianist Sony Ovalles and the tenor Francisco Casanova. He died in El Seibo, where he had lived his final twenty-five years; his wife, Mercedes de León Hiciano, survived him until 2019, and the song that made his name is still heard today among his descendants from New York to Lisbon.