Kalimete, born Ramfis Reyes in Azua, is a Dominican merengue urbano singer, producer and composer. He has been recording for more than twenty years and has spent almost all of that time arguing, in public and in the records themselves, that merengue is not finished.

Dominicano de Pura Cepa

The song that made him is a declaration of nationality set to a street merengue, and it did something unusual: it came back. He cut a new version fifteen years after the original, and that version became the centre of a television campaign that Telemundo 47 in New York built around the month of Dominican heritage, with him as its face.

The campaign won an Emmy in 2022. A merengue singer collecting a television award for a song about being Dominican, in a New York studio, for an audience of Dominicans who left, is a fairly exact picture of where the genre lives now.

The other career

Before the music there was tennis, which he played seriously and still talks about as the thing that taught him how to work. It is not a common line on a merenguero’s record.

Malacorita and after

Malacorita arrived in 2021 in a straight merengue version and then in a merenbow — merengue crossed with dembow — recorded with Rochy RD. Maldito Flow is the track most people know him by. Suéltala came back as a remix with Fulanito, and Ella Ya Me Olvidó, made with Omega, took him to a Premios Soberano nomination for collaboration.

The nominations run across the industry: Artista Tropical del Año at Premio Lo Nuestro, Mejor Artista Tropical at the Premios Heat, several Billboard placings and a run of number ones at home on Monitor Latino.

He works through Sueños Records, and the jokes keep coming — a merengue version of CNCO’s Bailemos that turns Reggaetón Lento into Merengue Lento, then De Otro Planeta in 2026. The humour is the method, not a break from it: merengue de calle has always carried its argument inside a joke.