Casandra Damirón was a Dominican singer, dancer and folklorist known throughout the country as La Soberana. She built the first Dominican folk dance company to travel abroad, and the highest awards in Dominican arts have carried her name since two years after her death.

Barahona

She was born in Barahona in 1919 and was performing at six, in the evenings the Teatro La Unión put on there. She learned piano and guitar as a girl, made her first formal appearance at eleven at the town’s cultural centre, and moved with her family to the colonial quarter of Santo Domingo in 1933.

Club Antillas

Her debut in the capital came in 1939 at the Club Antillas. She returned the following year on the night the Antillas orchestra opened there, directed by the pianist and composer Luis Armando Rivera González, newly back from Cuba, and sang a bolero of Agustín Lara’s in front of a full room. He began training her repertoire with her in the afternoons at the Ateneo Dominicano.

Her uncle Fello Damirón arranged a series of appearances for her on La Voz del Yuna, the Bonao station that then decided which Dominican performers the country heard. She stayed in Bonao, where the musicians passing through included Lope Balaguer, Esther Borja and Olga Chorens.

La Soberana

The songs that fixed her were Cosita Linda and Maldición Gitana, by the Panamanian composer Avelino Muñoz, in 1946. A contract in San Juan followed, her first season outside the country, and then Havana, where she worked the television programmes and the nightclubs alongside Benny Moré and came home with a stack of awards. The Cuban magazines of the period covered her as a visiting star rather than as a curiosity.

The dance company

In 1955 the government mounted a world’s fair in Santo Domingo, and the best folk companies of Europe and the Americas came to it while the host country had nothing formally representing it. Damirón gathered the best dancers on the island almost on the spot and made one: merengues, palos, mangulinas and carabinés, danced by people who had grown up with them.

The company was named ambassadors of Dominican culture, and it took her to France, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Argentina. After a performance in Paris the French press described her as an empress rather than a sovereign, and called her manner velvet and dynamite at once.

The repertoire

Almost everything she is remembered for singing was written by Luis Armando Rivera González: Reina, Rosas para Ti, Vida, Llegaste a Mí, Porque Dudas, Yo No Sé, Mi Cielo, Ella, La Salve de Monte Adentro, Baile Mi Merengue, El Merengue y la Plena and Noche Tropical, along with the music for Eres Todo en Mi Vida. Outside that catalogue she took Campanitas de Cristal, by the Puerto Rican Rafael Hernández.

Aquí Nosotros

She spent the rest of her life teaching. She founded dance schools, pushed for the arts to be studied in the public schools, and in the middle of the seventies created a folk television programme, Aquí Nosotros, broadcast on Sunday mornings on Dominican state television with the stated aim of teaching young people to dance their own rhythms. In 1974 she chose Sonia Silvestre to receive the Cuban national folkloric company during the games held in Santo Domingo, which is how Cuba first heard her.

El Soberano

She died in Santo Domingo in December 1983. Two years later the Association of Art Columnists founded the Premios Casandra in her name, and they ran under it until 2012, when a dispute between the association and her family over the rights to the name led to their being renamed the Premios Soberano — after her nickname rather than her name, which left the honour intact and the argument unresolved.

The Senate declared her a glory of national art and culture. The state television building carries her name by law, as do a station on the first line of the Santo Domingo metro, the avenue into Barahona and a neighbourhood of that city, and she has a star on the walk of fame on Avenida Winston Churchill.