Yulaysi Miranda: from "Sonando en Cuba" to Popular Singer in Hungary

October 10, 2022

The life of Yulaysi Miranda Ferrer has been linked to music from the beginning. Daughter of a former member of the legendary all-female orchestra Anacaona and granddaughter of a tres player from the Septeto Nacional, since she was old enough to understand, she chose songs as her language for self-expression.

This woman, who will turn 32 on October 11th, achieved fame in our country in 2016, when she participated in and won the second edition of the talent show Sonando en Cuba. Then, under the guidance of Mayito Rivera, she demonstrated her enormous vocal qualities to impose herself indisputably and win the affection of the entire country.

However, although we knew her through the screen, this young woman already had a notable track record, as she had been part of groups such as Aromas de Cuba, Estrellas de chocolate, Son Damas, Onda Libre and Dorgeris Álvarez, as well as the quartets Los Cónsules and Trova y son, and had even recorded with the Septeto Habanero the album Orgullo de Los Soneros (1998).

After her television success, she released the songs Te esperé and Tiempo al tiempo. Later she was on the album Sonando duro alongside other participants from Sonando en Cuba and in 2018 she was also part of the cast of the musical and comedic show La historia no contada de Bailando en Cuba 2, which was on the Karl Marx theater marquee for several weeks.

As a solo artist, she had the opportunity to perform on stages in Vietnam, Canada, France and Nicaragua, and in 2019 she was "signed" by Lazarito Valdés to become part of the well-known orchestra Bamboleo.

That same year she had another great joy when she performed the song Gotas de vinagre for the film Havana Kyrie (2020), by Paolo Consorti. The thing is, beyond that great opportunity, Yulaysi was able to meet, among others, Italian actor Franco Nero, famous for his participation in films such as Django (1986), Querelle (1982) and Camelot (1867).

Around that time she participated in the Adolfo Guzmán competition, as part of the tribute paid to composer and performer Lourdes Torres, and was also a jury member for the pre-selection of the third season of Sonando en Cuba.

But to better understand Yulaysi's present, we have to travel back in time, specifically to June 2016. At that time, she met in Havana Gergő Krisztián Tóth, a Hungarian violinist from The Orchestre Now who studied at the famous New York school Bard College. From that moment on, both began to communicate via email and that's where the love grew that they solidified in 2020, when they decided to get married.

Together, they held an online concert in collaboration with Unicef to celebrate the 31st anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Both also shaped Miranda's first album as a solo artist, Sabor a miel, from which the single that gave the album its title stood out, as well as A mi hija and Bien rico, the latter a duet between the singer and the violinist.

In the year following their marriage, in September 2021, she went to Budapest, the Hungarian capital, where she has continued to make a splash thanks to her art.

In the first half of 2022 she participated in an audition for the talent show Sztárban Sztár Leszek, which features singers who imitate national and foreign stars. That time she took the stage nine months pregnant and performed the hit I Have Nothing—popularized by Whitney Houston—with her husband as accompanying instrumentalist.

After impressing the show's mentors, the Cuban woman joined the team of rapper Majka and sometime later returned to the set with a surprise: between one performance and another, in June of this year her second daughter, Miel María, was born.

Only 28 days after giving birth via cesarean section, the Caribbean native reappeared on screen with a larger version of her family, made up, furthermore, of her 10-year-old daughter, Vanessa, from a previous relationship.

"I was afraid of making some abrupt movements and that my wound could be affected, but thank God everything went well," Yulaysi posted on her Facebook page after the emotional moment of her return to the musical show.

In that context, she also stated: "we are very lucky, because Miel doesn't cry except when she's hungry, when her stomach hurts, and she already loves music. I sing to her a lot, her father plays the violin and she hums, she's barely three months old."

Currently, Miranda has a new challenge on Sztárban Sztár Leszek in which she will surely continue demonstrating her overwhelming musical quality and gaining even more international recognition for Cuban music.