Daymé Arocena’s Meteoric Ascent From Cuba to the Global Stage

You'd be hard-pressed to find a more impressive case study of artistic self-determination than singer-songwriter Daymé Arocena's career.

As a millennial born in 1992, Arocena grew up in abject poverty during Cuba's Special Period, the dismal economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Food was scarce in the Santos Suárez neighborhood of Havana, where she was one of 14 people sharing a two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with no electricity or running water.

Music was never lacking in her family's home, however. It was an abundant source of spiritual sustenance, no matter the material privations.

"We didn't have electricity most of the time, so we would sing and dance every day," Arocena tells New Times. "My earliest memories are of my family making music themselves with no instruments, only their voices and anything that could be a musical instrument — a table, a fork, and a knife. Everything became an instrument."

Cuba is widely considered one of the world's richest and most prolific music regions, spanning dozens of distinct folk genres. Arocena, a devout practitioner of Santería and the African diasporic Yoruba faith, can trace the island's ever-flowing musical spring back to the continent of her once-enslaved ancestors.

"My family was really, really poor, but they never stopped singing, and they never stopped dancing because we are Black, of African descent," she says. "In Africa, music is medicine. It's a tribal thing. No matter how hard a situation is, the way we heal is through music."
Of course, Arocena was also a child prodigy who, from the age of 10, was weaned on Russian classical sheet music at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory. If her destiny as a professional musician had been written that early on, perhaps her fate as a Cuban exile would have been sealed then as well.

"We have been banned from the music industry," she says of her generation of struggling Cuban musicians. "Because Cuba is a communist country, they stop any access to the industry. We don't know what Spotify is. We don't know how to monetize YouTube. We don't have access to any of these platforms, and we don't even have credit or debit cards to pay for a subscription or get paid."

Leaving Cuba was a must for Arocena to fulfill her globe-circling artistic ambitions, and she finally did in 2019, first immigrating to Canada. But she admits the transition has not been as effortlessly liberating as one might imagine, especially for a career musician.

"Many of us leave the island with a dream to be seen, but once we leave the island, if we get to leave, it's like taking a time machine into the future," she says. "Once we arrive in a different country, we don't even know how to live in a different society. We don't know what a credit card is. We don't know how to pay for food with the card. Do you need to start washing cars? By the time you start getting the vibe of the place, you've already spent ten years. Your time is gone. It's a really unfair situation for us."

Life in exile has been easier for Arocena since she discovered the enchantment of Puerto Rico, where she recorded her new album, Alkemi, with Grammy-winning producer Eduardo Cabra (AKA Visitante of Calle 13).
"I went to Puerto Rico, and my idea was, 'I'm just going to record an album,' but then I discovered that I'd arrived in a place that felt like home," she explains. "I realized that many of my favorite artists globally are actually from Puerto Rico, and I said, 'Hey, this is my place to stay.'"

"I believe that I'm so lucky to have what I have," she stresses. "One of my dreams is to give hope to my people. I would like to grow and be global, not just for my ego or my own success, but also to give my people, my colleagues, the hope they need. They need to see the representation of Cubans on a global level."

As she pivots from the ecstatic Afro-Cuban jazz of her critically acclaimed first four albums to a more sensual and polished urbano sound, Arocena's new album and music videos also see her vying for the representation of Black women in Latin pop.

"It's been a really long journey as a Black Latina woman," she says. "There are no references to Black Latinas in the corporate scene. We're working hard to change that."

Of course, the fight for representation must begin with body-positive self-love. "I wanted to show myself now as a woman who loves what she sees in the mirror," she discloses. "Now that I'm in my 30s, in this new stage of my life, I feel more beautiful than ever and more at peace and in balance with my body. I'm not afraid of my body anymore. I don't judge my body anymore. I look at my face, and I love myself."

Daymé Arocena. 8 p.m. Saturday, May 18, at the Citadel, 8300 NE Second Ave., Miami; escalasonora.com. Tickets cost $29 to $45 via seetickets.us.