Cuban Rapper Yudith Porto Dies in Tenerife at Age 50

July 9, 2024

Cuban singer and songwriter Yudith Porto has died at age 50 in a hospital on the Spanish island of Tenerife, where she had been admitted after suffering a stroke.

According to information released this Monday by the communications agency Contextos, Yudith Porto, who was part of Mambisa, the big band Orquesta Jazz de Canarias and the show 'Nanas del mundo', among other musical projects, died last Saturday at the Hospital Universitario de Canarias.

"After a week connected to the equipment, yesterday they disconnected her. She suffered a stroke during a concert. Yudith Porto (La Yuya) was a legend of Cuban rap, known throughout the industry".

Porto, who was born in the Cuban municipality of Casablanca, in the bay of Havana, arrived in Tenerife in 2001 after a brief stay in Madrid.

Granddaughter of Spanish emigrants, she was the second of four sisters who left their country in search of new horizons, and in Tenerife she welcomed her sister Katy.

Yudith Porto was born in Havana in 1973, and in the 90s she was one of the members of the trio Instinto, the first female rap group in Cuba. On the island, the group performed at the Alamar Festivals alongside other groups of the genre, until these events were banned.

In Instinto, Yudith mixed rap with other genres such as lyrical and Afro-Cuban music, and alongside the other women demonstrated great talent for improvisation.

With these credentials, she arrived in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the early 2000s and from that moment on continued her artistic career alongside her husband, musician, composer and director René González Pérez.

She also joined Mambisa, another group formed almost entirely by women, to fuse flamenco, Canarian and Afro-Cuban rhythms and sounds, and for several years has also been associated with the Orquesta Jazz de Canarias.

Most of her artistic career took place in Tenerife, according to Cuban music producer Rafael Heredia, who directed her on multiple occasions, both in Cuba and in Spain, and shared artistic work with her, as indicated in a statement.

Porto stood out as a member of Cuba's first female rap group, Instinto, which won the National Project award, which consisted of being a recipient of a series of promotional actions, including the recording of an album.

She decided to settle in Tenerife, where she consolidated an artistic body of work that allowed her to participate in children's animation and education projects and where she developed her acting skills, among other initiatives in the program 'Los Titirimúsicos', on the television network Antena 3 Canarias.

She was part of the percussion group Mambisa, where she contributed her voice, and also participated in the big band Orquesta Jazz de Canarias.

Along with her compatriot Raúl Cabrera, also a resident of Tenerife, she toured the Spanish Canary Islands and Cuba, among other places, with the show 'Nanas del mundo'.

Another artist who reacted to Yudith's death was rapper Yrak Saenz Orta, founder of the emblematic group Doble Filo.

Saenz called the deceased artist "one of the best voices in the history of Cuban rap". Furthermore, he considered her to be a multifaceted artist, an incredible and charismatic person.