Juan Polanco was a Dominican singer who carried merengue into Cuba’s big-band tradition and, from exile, lent his voice to one of Dominican music’s boldest acts of protest against the Trujillo dictatorship.

A Dominican voice in Havana

Polanco joined Cuba’s storied Conjunto Casino as a vocalist alongside his compatriot Alberto Beltrán, recording merengues reshaped by the ensemble’s Cuban big-band sound — among them «San Antonio», a Ñico Lora composition captured live on 23 September 1955.

«Que me tumben a Chapita»

By the end of the 1950s he had settled in Venezuela, where in 1961 he recorded «Que me tumben a Chapita» with the orchestra of Porfi Jiménez — a merengue openly hostile to Trujillo, whose nickname gave the song its title. The record could not circulate inside the Dominican Republic while the dictatorship stood, and it remains one of the clearest examples of Dominican protest music made from exile in the months surrounding Trujillo’s assassination on 30 May 1961.

Legacy

Better remembered today for a single act of open defiance than for a catalogue of hits, Juan Polanco used a Cuban-inflected Dominican merengue to say, from abroad, what could not be said at home.