The Cuban singer Daymé Arocena reported that the jazz club Blues Alley, in Washington D.C., canceled the concert she was supposed to perform with the trumpeter Kalí Rodríguez-Peña, after both musicians requested that their performance not be associated with the Embassy of Cuba in the United States.
"This show for today in Washington D.C. was canceled to preserve relations with the Cuban Embassy in the United States," Arocena revealed in a video posted on Facebook.
"They canceled us for being consistent with the cause of Cuba, our land... and with the suffering and the need for freedom of our people," he wrote.
The concert was part of a Cuban jazz series organized by Blues Alley— the oldest continuously operating jazz club in the United States— as part of its Hispanic Heritage Month programming. To facilitate this, the venue partnered with the embassies of several Latin American countries including Cuba, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, and Honduras.
It was the musician Paquito D'Rivera who alerted Arocena that the event promotion portrayed it as a Cuban jazz day organized in collaboration with the regime's embassy. Following this warning, Rodríguez-Peña and his team reached out to the club and sent an email requesting the removal of any link between their performance and the diplomatic representation of the regime.
Blues Alley's response was to cancel the concert a day before the show, without any explanation.
Arocena clearly explained why that association was unacceptable to them: "The embassy is the primary direct representative of the Cuban dictatorship, from which we first fled, and secondly, it is the repressive body that has been established in our country for over 60 years."
And he clarified: "That doesn't represent the same for us as it does for the Mexican artist who has a concert and you associate with the Mexican embassy."
The cancellation surprised them. "Yesterday we were all sitting in a park, Kalí's band and I, trying to understand how this happened, especially in a country of freedom," he said.
Arocena was particularly critical of the club's attitude: "The alliance with the embassy was more important than the concert we were performing, showing not an ounce of empathy for what we were proposing."
This is not the first time the singer has faced situations related to the Cuban regime, whose power manages to extend beyond the Island. In October 2022, Arocena reported that during a concert in Gothenburg, Sweden, pro-regime propaganda was distributed among the audience.
At the end of the video, the artist apologized to the audience who had planned to attend the concert and expressed her hope that something like this would not happen again: "We never imagined that something like this could occur, and I hope that another concert can be organized in that city soon, and that these things do not continue happening."
"We came to this country to live in freedom, and I hope our liberties will be respected," he concluded.
Filed under: