Pochy y su Cocoband is a Dominican merengue orchestra founded and led by Pochy Familia, who writes and arranges everything it records. Between the end of the eighties and the middle of the nineties it put out an unbroken run of hits that no other Dominican merengue band has matched, and it is still filling rooms four decades on.

Before the band

Pochy Familia was writing before he was leading. His first hit, La Negra Pola, was written in 1979 for Cheché Abreu — nearly a decade before the Cocoband existed — and it won him a gold record while he was still very young.

He spent the years that followed as an arranger and composer for other people’s orchestras, among them Los Hermanos Rosario and Richie Ricardo, and worked in the studios of Mateo San Martín and his label Kubaney. That is where the band came from: not from a stage, but from the arranging desk.

The founding

He put the Cocoband together in 1988 with other musicians and singers, and what followed is the statistic the genre still quotes. From 1988 to 1995 the group placed close to seventy hits without a break, and across seventeen productions it has more than a hundred. Every single track on the first seven records charted, from the opening cut to the last one.

Pero con coco

The sound is güira, tambora and a horn line pushed hard, with lyrics that are funny before they are anything else. Salsa con Coco, La Faldita, La Flaca, El Ombliguito, A Usted Lo Botan, Bala Bala, Los Hombres Feos, Ya Se Me Olvidó Tu Nombre, El Hombre Llegó Parao, De Reversa, La Pinea, Ay Pero Qué Calor, El Cacú, Esperando el 31, El Batecito and La Peliona are the ones the country knows.

The band also kept material back. Los Kenton asked them to release El Negro del Swing, which the Cocoband had shelved, and had a hit with it.

Their audience has a name of its own. Cocoband followers call themselves the Cocotuses.

35 Años con Coco

In October 2022 sixteen merengue singers recorded a single song together in tribute to the band, running through sixteen of its hits — all of them written by Pochy Familia. Listín Diario reported it as the first time in Dominican musical history that that many recognised artists of the genre had joined voices to honour one merenguero.

Those who sang on it were Wilfrido Vargas, Jossie Esteban y La Patrulla 15, Milly Quezada, Fernando Villalona, Ramón Orlando, Miriam Cruz, Toño Rosario, Héctor Acosta “El Torito”, Eddy Herrera, Rafa Rosario, José Peña Suazo y La Banda Gorda, Kinito Méndez, Sergio Vargas, Rubby Pérez and Jandy Ventura, along with Chucky Acosta. The anniversary concert followed that December at the Teatro La Fiesta of the Hotel Jaragua.

Four decades

The band has not stopped. Las Mujeres Siempre Ganan came in 2021, Pa’ los Coquitos in 2026, and its 2026 calendar runs through the Hotel Jaragua, the Gran Arena del Cibao, the Gran Teatro Nacional, the amphitheatre at Altos de Chavón and the Hard Rock in Santo Domingo.