As she grew into adolescence, Arocena became the lead singer of the big band Los Primos, then created Alami, a jazz band made up of all women. (It later was reformed as Maqueque with the Toronto-based saxophonist and bandleader Jane Bunnett.) In 2014, the French D.J. and producer Gilles Peterson, who founded the London indie label Brownswood Recordings, invited Arocena to participate in “Havana Cultura Mix — The Soundclash,” a collaboration between international electronic artists and Cuban musicians.
In some ways, Arocena’s tendency to mix Afro-Cuban folkloric music, post-salsa “timba” music and outside influences like R&B reflected the mid-2010s Havana scene that Peterson encountered, one that produced the funk master Cimafunk. He sang in Interactivo, a crucial band from this period that was “the soundtrack of an entire generation,” Arocena said. “Every Wednesday, all the cool kids would go to see them at the Bertolt Brecht” cultural center, she added, peppering her speech with an occasional English word or phrase.
By 2016, Arocena had played at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, and at Sub Rosa, a short-lived club in the meatpacking district of New York. As her profile rose, she performed with Cuban jazz titans like Paquito D’Rivera and Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Orchestra.
In 2019, she decided to leave Cuba for good and moved to Toronto, where her husband could secure a visa. “It was a very hard time for me,” she said. “The pandemic came, and that mixed with emigration problems, and it was so cold! I had left everything, it was traumatic. I didn’t feel like listening to jazz, any music that was very complex, or that made me think a lot. I wanted to hear things that relaxed me.”
Arocena retreated to music she heard when she was growing up, like the Brazilian pop vocalist Djavan and the neo-soul diva Sade. “My dad would climb to the roof of our building with an antenna to catch a U.S. radio signal,” she recalled. “He was way in love with Sade, and I know that in the spermatozoid that is Daymé, there’s some Sade in there.”