At about age ten, Millo Castro Zaldarriaga performs with her sisters in Anacaona, Cuba’s first all‑girl dance band, breaking the island’s taboo against female drummers.
On 1 January 1932 (a conventional placeholder date used by educators for this year-only event), a ten‑year‑old Millo Castro Zaldarriaga performed as a percussionist with her older sisters in Anacaona, widely recognized as Cuba’s first all‑girl dance band. In literary retellings and educational resources, this moment marks the point when she broke Cuba’s traditional taboo against female drummers.
At the time, Cuban musical culture commonly restricted drum performance to men, particularly in Afro‑Cuban and popular dance settings, so a Chinese‑African‑Cuban girl stepping onto the bandstand as a bongó and conga player challenged entrenched gender and racial expectations. Anacaona’s line‑up of sisters playing jazz and dance music for public audiences made visible a new model of female musical professionalism on the island.
Although primary archival documentation remains scarce and sources usually provide only the year, later accounts by poet Margarita Engle, illustrator Rafael López, and classroom histories emphasize this early‑1930s debut as a turning point in Cuban music.[6][5] By demonstrating that a girl could hold the rhythmic center of a dance band, Millo helped open the door for future generations of Cuban women percussionists, inspiring the modern view—often cited in educational materials—that “there are now many female drummers in Cuba thanks to Millo’s courage.”[6]