African drumbeats. Hip hop & torch singers. Cuban bolero & guaguancó. Featuring music by Cuban legends, Santería devotees, and divas from around the globe, the beats in this playlist—like my debut memoir My Mother in Havana—sing with spirit and passion, merging like rivers to summon the saints and the gods, to wake us up to where we are wholly alive, deeply rooted, and connected to every other living thing.
MADE OF GOLD, Ibeyi & Pa Salieu
In the film adaptation of My Mother in Havana, I imagine this song playing in the opening credits. Written and performed by French-Cuban twins Naomi and Lisa-Kainde Díaz, whose band name means “twins” in Yoruba, Made of Gold is a gathering in of the ancestors. Rooting their sound in the Yoruba traditions they inherited from their father, Cuban percussionist Miguel “Anga” Diaz, the sisters say that while they were recording, they could feel they were making contact with the ancestors, and that what they were recording was calling on the truths of the past and the power of the ancients. The result is hypnotic and haunting: an invitation for each of us to connect with an ancestral magic that has been handed down in an unbroken line. Toknow ourselves, like the sky that “encloses stars” as one who encloses magic.
UN TABACO PARA ELEGUA, Orquesta Akokán
After calling in the ancestors, it is Santería’s trickster-gatekeeper Elegua who receives the first offering during every ceremony, which makes “Un Tabaco Para Elegua” a fitting choice for the top of this playlist. Performed by Latin jazz ensemble Orquesta Akokán, whose name in Yoruba means “from the heart”, the song is a sultry invitation for the spiritual gatekeeper to open our road to the pantheon of gods who look after us.
BÈSAME MUCHO, Lisa Ono
This Cuban bolero, written in 1932 by Mexican singer Consuelo Velasquez and recognized in 1999 as the most recorded and covered song in Spanish of all time, is the tune I picture my parents dancing to when they visit Havana in 1951. The romantic zest and idealism of the lyrics offer my parents—much as I imagine their days in Havana did—a respite from the roles they occupied back home: the family businesses my father chafed against, and the affairs he repeatedly turned to for solace. My mother’s choice to stand at his side and mother his children. But while the spell of these lyrics lasts only the duration of a single dance, there is to my ear an enduring power in the voice of the diva who delivers them. And it is this power that interests me. Before my mother met my father, she trained to become an opera singer. And while she gave up those dreams to marry my father, it was her voice that filled our house as she washed the dishes or called me in to dinner from the neighborhood. Neither soft nor matter-of-fact, her voice was operatic, booming. To honor the power of that voice, I include on this playlist female powerhouses from across the globe—women who, like my mother, fill the sky with the sound of their own selves.
MACK THE KNIFE, Ella Fitzgerald
While my parents both claimed this tale of the deadly antihero Mack the Knife as their favorite dance song, it is my father I think of when I hear it. He was a self-taught jitterbug dancer who improvised his moves, entertaining whatever crowd was watching with his swagger and bravado while he left my mother to fend for herself. Perhaps this is why I love this version so much. For if Mack the Knife is a stand-in for showboating and pernicious masculinity, then Ella Fitzgerald is the larger-than-life diva who steps in to put men like my father in their place. Recorded during a 1960 concert in Berlin, the Queen of Jazz takes over as master improviser when she forgoes the traditional lyrics made famous by male icons like Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin and makes this song her own.
A LOS SANTOS, Conjunto Candela
It is the tradition of summoning the gods through dance that first called me to the Afro-Cuban religions. How the crackling of the batá drums announce the invitation for the oricha to join their human counterparts. The lifting of dancers’ skirts and arms, machetes and clubs calling those gods from the realm of the spirits into the physical world, inviting them to climb dancers’ bodies like trees, mount them like horses, until it is clear that the dancers have stopped performing the oricha and have become the oricha. And so, as you listen to this lively guaguancó, I invite you to join the singer in invoking Obatalá, Yemayá, Changó and the rest of theoricha to dance with their human counterparts—to allow the line between performance and ritual, between skin and spirit, to dissolve in a sea of cloth and sweat and prayer.
NEGRA CARIDAD, Daymé Arocena
Described as a cross between Celia Cruz and Aretha Franklin, Afro-Cuban jazz singer and Santería devotee Daymé Arocena brings us this ode to Cuba’s patron saint Our Lady of Charity, a copper-skinned Black Madonna often syncretized with the Afro-Cuban river deity, Ochún, who Arocena invokes as a mulata sabrosa y cumbachera—fun loving and sensual and filled with light.
MADRE, Orishas
Madre, en el mundo, hay una sola, sing Orishas, a Havana hip hop group named after the deities worshipped in African-based religions like Santería. And while the song does not directly reference Santería’s mother spirits like Yemayá and Ochún, their strengths and attributes are embedded within its lyrics. An ode to flesh and blood mothers, and especially to the single mother who is both mother and father for her child, the song—like My Mother in Havana—is both a moving memorial to one mother and a bold celebration of all mothers and the creative principle that generates and animates us all.
HOLD UP, Beyoncé
How could a playlist devoted to the river goddess be complete without a song from one of her most celebrated American devotees? From Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade, “Hold Up” juxtaposes lyrics of a woman who has been wronged with a video that reflects the strength of her spiritual power. Dressed in a flowing yellow Roberto Cavalli dress, gold jewelry and bare feet, Beyoncé channels Ochún, emerging from golden doors with water gushing like a ferocious river past her and down the stairs, underscoring tales that describe the river goddess’s fierce temper and sinister smile when she has been offended. As the video continues, a smiling, laughing and dancing Beyoncé smashes store windows, cars and cameras with a baseball bat, fully inhabiting this fierce, resilient, unstoppable version of herself.
PARA OCHÚN, Hector Lavoe
“Protection, I have it”, Puerto Rican salsa superstar Héctor Lavoe begins this tribute to Ochún. Written after the singer known throughout the Americas as “El Cantante” sought the help of a high priest of the Santería faith to treat his drug addiction, “Para Ochún” is a petition to the river goddess and her mother, the sea goddess Yemayá, to lend the singer their willpower and the ability to move forward with his life.
RIVER, Ibeyi
The second song on this playlist from French-Cuban twin sisters Ibeyi, River’s bed is a deep percussive groove, with Naomi playing the wooden-box cajón and the double-headed, hourglass-shaped batá while the duo’s voices float above the drums in a mix of English and Yoruba that summon the river goddess Ochún. Let me baptize my soul with the help of your waters, the sisters sing in a call that is an invocation, an invitation for each of us to become an initiate of the river goddess, to baptize our souls with the help of her mighty waters.
AVE MARIA, Beyoncé
It was Franz Schubert’s original aria that was playing when I first visited Our Lady of Charity’s sanctuary in El Cobre. I discovered the Madonna standing at the central altar—her dress spun from gold threads and hand-sewn by Spanish nuns. The 14-karat rays of her crown sparking off shafts of light that streamed through stained glass to frame her blessed figure. The marble altar on which she stands arrayed with vases of roses and gladiolas. And, filling the vast space around her, the rustling of bodies in pews; the footsteps of visitors lighting a candle or leaving a prayer. And the sound of “Ave Maria”, like Beyoncé’s lyrics, filling me with a voice rising inside me. Ave Maria. Ave María.
BEMBELEQUA, Celia Cruz
In the 1990s, I saw Celia Cruz perform at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom. I didn’t know then that she’d been christened de la Caridad, promised to Our Lady of Charity since birth. Had grown up singing the songs of the oricha. Nor did I know how those West African rhythms had found their way into the very music Celia Cruz helped make famous: mambo and salsa, son, and cha-cha-chá. It was the power of those rhythms that had brought me to the Chicago ballroom that evening, and I was far from alone. The dance hall thrummed with the excitement of those who’d come to hear the Cuban queen. She was sixty-seven, and still with another decade of performance in her when she took the microphone dressed in sequins and chiffon, her teased hair shooting from her head like the glorious nimbus of the Madonna. While there were many of Celia’s songs that could have made it onto this playlist, I’d like to leave us with this tribute to the Santería bembé, or party for the oricha—a glorious confluence of song, rhythm, and movement calling the spirits to join us and watch over us as they have for millennia.