Manuel Troncoso —born Manuel Troncoso Ramírez in Santo Domingo on 21 September 1927, died there on 17 September 2012— was a Dominican lawyer and composer, one of the most recorded lyricists of the golden age of Dominican romantic song.

A lawyer with a poet’s pen

He earned a doctorate in law from the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo and practiced as an attorney, presiding over a prominent group of jurists in the capital, while writing songs on the side. He described himself, in his own words, as “a mere amateur” next to the professional musicians whose careers his lyrics helped define.

A recorded songbook

Over three decades his songs were recorded across Dominican and Latin American popular music, from Johnny Ventura and Joseíto Mateo to Maridalia Hernández, Niní Cáffaro and Francis Santana, and abroad by Tito Rodríguez, Plácido Domingo and Olga Guillot. Among his best known are «Antifaz», «Sígueme», «Cuando llueve», «Tres veces te amo», «Súplica», «Siempre tú», «En honor a la verdad» and «Tiene que ser».

«Canta Mundo» and the Festival of 1968

He wrote «Canta Mundo» in the mid-1960s, as the country absorbed the aftermath of the 1965 civil war amid a wider Cold War anxiety that its lyrics seemed to foresee. Sung by Luchy Vicioso, it placed second at the First Festival de la Canción Dominicana in November 1968, and was recorded soon after by Vicioso and by Tito Rodríguez. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the song found a new audience when Gilberto Santa Rosa revived it with Colombia’s Orquesta Sinfónica de Cardas.

Legacy

Troncoso was also the lawyer and close friend of Rafael Solano, and it fell to him to travel abroad to register Solano’s songs with the publisher Peer International, which had no Dominican office at the time — including «Por Amor», winner of that same 1968 festival. When rumors that Troncoso himself had written the song’s lyrics grew persistent months later, he published a letter in the newspaper El Nacional on 1 May 1969 personally and explicitly crediting both the words and the melody of «Por Amor» to Solano alone, dismissing the rumors as absurd. The claim resurfaced in February 2026, when the Spanish scholar José María Paz Gago argued, from a stylistic analysis of Troncoso’s own letter and songs, that Troncoso had in fact written the lyrics; the Dominican Academy of Sciences responded on 8 February 2026 by formally reaffirming Solano as the song’s sole author.