Dianelys Hernandez

Hernandez, who sang for Fidel Castro at the International Festival of Medicine in Havana as a child, was 16 when she defected while touring Atlantic Canada with a group of young Cuban singers. Strangers she had met a day earlier while performing on the boardwalk in Saint John took her to Immigration officials, who initially were unsure whether to grant her status as a political refugee.

“When I walked in there, the people at Immigration told me they were already looking for me,” Ms. Hernandez said. “They said, ‘Oh, we were expecting you.’ Somebody from the government in Cuba had called them and said terrible things about me, things that weren’t true, so at first they weren’t sure if they should believe a word I said.”

Eventually, however, Ms. Hernandez’s application for Immigration was accepted but, because she was a minor, she was required to move in with a family. She attended one year of high school in Saint John before moving to Toronto to study for a year at Oakwood Collegiate while honing her talent for singing at open microphones around the city.

All the while, government officials in Cuba were trying to persuade her to come home. When they couldn’t convince her, they even tried to trick her.

“At one point I suddenly got a call saying my mother was dying and that I had to immediately return to Havana,” Hernandez said. “But that made me suspicious, so I called home. My mother was drinking a rum and having a smoke when she answered the phone. She didn’t have any idea what was going on.

Trained briefly at Havana’s Conservatory of Music, Hernandez got her start singing in her family’s cramped apartment around candles made from scavenging tiny pieces of paraffin wax.

“Even though we were poor, and we had no light, no cold water, little food and what we had in the fridge was spoiling, those were still the happiest times of my life,” she said. “But unfortunately, my family couldn’t defect with me, and I miss them a lot.”

Now married to a sweetheart she met while attending high school in Saint John, Hernandez has a son, three years old, and works in customer service for one of Canada’s largest telecommunications firms. Since the end of last summer she has been busy rehearsing with her new band, Dee, and preparing to cut a demo. She hopes to tour Canada this summer and perform at jazz and music festivals across the country.

Canadian Idol’s fickle judges loved Hernandez from the first time they saw her last spring at auditions in Moncton. They continuously heaped praise upon her, even though her exotic looks and jazz-influenced vocals were not necessarily a comfortable fit for the show.

Inspired by Cuban diva Celia Cruz and a big fan of Ray Charles, Hernandez was sultry while singing “Summertime” from Porgy & Bess in Idol’s Round of 32 and saucy when doing Charles's “Unchain My Heart” while trying to earn a wild-card berth into the top 10.

“Everyone knows I sweat at the drop of a hat, but I sweat at the drop of your voice,” judge Farley Flex told her after she had concluded “Summertime.”

“By far and away, you are my favourite singer in this competition,” said Sass Jordan, another judge who has sold more than a million CDs of her own.