HAVANA TIMES – We bring our readers a translation of an interview with Cuban musician Dayme Arocena published in Spanish on February 17 by BBC Mundo.
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Daymé Arocena: “Leaving Cuba is like entering a time machine.”
“You leave the 60s and jump straight into the present.”
Daymé Arocena (Havana, 1992) says that some people are afraid to call her “black.”
By Ronald Alexander Avila-Claudio (BBC Mundo)
“It’s as if it were a hurtful word,” says the singer and songwriter known for fusing Afro-Cuban music with jazz, soul, funk, and other contemporary genres.
It’s early December, and she visits the BBC Mundo offices in Miami before performing at the Kubacabana restaurant in the west of the city.
In November, she took the stage at the Latin Grammys, also in Miami, after being nominated for Best Song for “A fuego lento,” which she produced with Dominican Vicente García and is part of “Alkemi,” her fifth studio album.
Arocena grew up in a large family in the Santos Suárez neighborhood of the Cuban capital.
Despite her success, when walking in her neighborhood, she sometimes chose to cross the street to avoid facing abuse and racism.
A violence that, she says, took her a long time to heal from and that she has faced – and still faces – in the music industry.
The same city that was the epicenter of her pain also shaped her in music.
At the age of 10, she entered the Alejandro García Cartula Conservatory, where she studied classical music.
Havana was also the place where she encountered the musical genres present in her work, which is also influenced by Yoruba rhythms, a faith she practices.
Since 2017, she has lived in Puerto Rico, after spending some time in Canada and having fled Cuba after the government questioned her art and labeled it as “capitalist.”
You started writing “A fuego lento (A slow fire),” the song for which you were nominated at the Latin Grammys, when you were a teenager, but you say you finished it recently when you found a love that made you feel “sensual” and “spiritually complete.”
I was a very insecure girl. If I saw a group of people on my block, I would cross to the other side. I preferred walking around the block than confronting people head-on. I had a very distorted perception of my physical appearance and what I projected. And in Cuba, harassment is widespread; there is no filter.
In places like Santiago or Guantánamo, there are many people who are as dark or darker than I am. But in Havana, where I am from, although there are many black people, there aren’t enough to normalize it and avoid harassment.
It took me a long time to change that perception of myself. One of the defining moments in my life that helped transform those thoughts was traveling. Through Europe, Oceania, Latin America… and also some countries in Africa. My worldview, how I saw myself, completely changed.
There were people in those travels who began to tell me that I’m beautiful. It’s important that others speak to you from a positive space. You don’t come into this world with doubts about yourself; those doubts are made to be felt by others.
If you grow up in an environment where people constantly tell you that you’re ugly, that because of your skin color, you’re unattractive, if there are people who ‘monsterize’ you and compare you to an animal, in a way, you start to believe it, and until the environment changes, your view will focus on what others say about you.
It’s important to speak loud and clear about this, and for people like me, who have suffered from these kinds of attacks and are now in a different position, to communicate our experiences to help heal others.
In many places in the Caribbean, there is the idea that this region is not racist because it’s a very clear mix of cultures.
There is a problem in saying “black,” as if that were offensive. A white person is called white, a blonde person is called blonde. Some people hesitate to call me black; they say morena, mulata, etc. I wonder why they don’t just call me black if that’s what I am. There’s no problem with that. Racism is so ingrained that we don’t realize how far it goes.
I live in Puerto Rico. I remember when I arrived and heard a song about the island called “Preciosa,” I noticed that to describe Puerto Rico, it mentioned the nobility of Spain and the fierce cry of the indigenous people. The only moment it mentions black people is to say “black evil.”
The color black is associated with all things bad, with the negative, when it’s such a useful color. We constantly wear black. It’s an elegant color, spectacular for anything. It’s the color of the night, of nocturnal life, of being bohemian, artistic, and dreamy.
What challenges do black people face in Cuba?
Cuba is a country with a burden of repression and dictatorship.
I’ll give you a concrete example. The majority of the protesters from July 11, 2021, who are still imprisoned today are black people. Many white people who protested that day are now in exile.
This shows how we are treated.
One of the most important activists and artists who participated in the protests, Mykael Osorbo, is serving eight years in prison. He is a Latin Grammy winner for the song “Patria y Vida.”
Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara is imprisoned and is a very important visual artist.
But other musicians who have also spoken out about the dictatorship and oppression in Cuba are now in Spain or Miami.
Would revisiting history be a solution to the problem of racism?
I grew up in a house with black people, a house where 14 people lived in two rooms.
It was a family of black people, and there we saw racism.
They told me not to dance in a certain way because I looked vulgar. If I moved too much or did twerking, they told me not to make those movements.
It was black people trying to protect me from what could happen to me for being too black for the world.
Your family starts to hold you back because of what being black could cost you in society.
All these beliefs need to be deconstructed and understand where they came from.
The Eurocentric view is much less sexual; people like us, rooted in the African continent, are stripped of that.
“Alkemi,” the title of your latest album, means alchemy in Yoruba. How does your religion influence the music you make?
I don’t make them converge; they are interconnected. There’s no way I could separate one from the other. The difference with other people is that I don’t hide it.
People are terrified of showing who they truly are. You wouldn’t imagine how many people I know, artists, musicians, influential people, who are as much practitioners of Santería as I am, but are afraid to talk about what they practice, simply because they have bought into the demonization and don’t embrace all of that cultural, spiritual, and ancestral identity that belongs to them.
When you ask me a question like that, all I can say is that I feel no shame or fear.
I study these topics, and understanding them from a perspective beyond just a religious and spiritual practice, understanding them structurally and academically, convinces me not to be ashamed.
What was the process of leaving Cuba like?
In Cuba, you don’t have the right to ask questions, to question or to understand.
I hit that wall, got scared, felt cornered, and left.
The process has taught me a lot; it’s not the same to travel the way I did before, as it is to fit into a world that wasn’t mine.
Leaving Cuba is like entering a time machine. You leave the 60s and jump straight into 2024.
It’s still a process of much learning, of humility. Everything I thought I knew, I’ve put away in my pocket and have been willing to learn from scratch. Absorbing whatever this new world can teach me.
There are very talented musicians who had spectacular careers in Cuba but haven’t been able to connect with the industry. They lack the humility to leave behind what they were in Cuba and understand that here, they are like babies who have to keep what they know to themselves and be ready for others to teach them.
I have friends, people who embrace me from many places. Certainly, as of today, I no longer feel like I belong to any specific place.
You’ve said that the music industry has made you feel excluded in many ways. Could you tell us about a specific situation?
When I finished singing at this year’s Latin Grammys, after I left the stage, someone very close to me said, “Daymé, I don’t know if it’s just me, but were you the only black person who sang here?”
I told them that one girl presented an award and another sang as part of a band.
To me, there were three black women on a stage celebrating Latin music. And the ones who sang did so as part of a group, not as solo performers.
The Latin industry thrives on us. You couldn’t talk about Latin industry without Afro-descendants. You couldn’t talk about salsa, bachata, merengue, or reggaeton without black heritage.
When something like what I’ve shared happens, it shows a clear example of how the structure of Latin music today still doesn’t create space for people like me.
For the industry, music is part of the market, which isn’t necessarily wrong. But in their desire to sell and exchange, they don’t consider black people as visibly attractive.
Black people who sing this kind of music, who dance these rhythms, are okay for a cultural space but not for an industrial one. They’re okay for a folkloric space, but not for a commercial one.
For the creation of “Alkemi,” you moved to Puerto Rico. How has the island changed you?
Puerto Rico is a big illusion, it makes me think I’m in Cuba. It sells me that fantasy, and I buy it. It’s the same land, the same beach, the same waves, the same sun. That does me good.
Puerto Rico helped me understand myself as Caribbean; I didn’t know what that was. It helped me create beautiful artistic and musical alliances with both Puerto Rican and Dominican musicians with whom I had never connected before.
That island has changed the way I see music, it made me understand it in a modern way.
I came from making music the way it was done 50 years ago, in a more traditional manner. But now there’s a lot of technological data that, if it weren’t for Puerto Rico, I would have never understood.
Although I lived in Canada and traveled to many countries, if the information doesn’t come from someone you can connect with, a brother who shares your roots and shows you how you can use and combine it, you don’t internalize it.
No matter how many times I stepped foot in Europe, I never understood electronic music. I didn’t see how it could be combined. I had to go to Puerto Rico, listen to Bad Bunny, and see how he uses bomba, a local genre, in his music to understand that those different worlds can be merged.
That was possible because the information came from people like me, people who were born with drums in their hands.
I chose the best place on the planet to be.
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First published in Spanish by BBC Mundo and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.
Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.
