Camila Cabello – Havana ft. Young Thug

The Song Nobody Wanted As A Single That Changed Everything

When Frank Dukes played a simple salsa piano loop in the studio in 2017, songwriter Ali Tamposi started singing over it and the hook arrived so fast that everyone in the room thought they must have accidentally written something that already existed. “We were singing it in the studio thinking this was too easy,” Tamposi recalled. Camila Cabello had told the team she wanted to write a song about Havana — the city she was born in, the city that was always half of her heart — and the melody just fell into place around the idea. What nobody expected was that the label would resist it, radio would initially reject it, and it would still become the defining pop song of 2017.

Released on August 3, 2017, “Havana” debuted at number 99 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent ten weeks crawling toward the top 20 before the music video changed everything. Once that telenovela-inspired, nearly seven-minute clip arrived in October, the song shot into the top 10 and eventually reached number one — making Cabello only the third artist in Billboard history to top both the Hot 100 and the Billboard 200 in the same week, after Beyoncé in 2003 and Britney Spears in 1999. In the UK it spent five consecutive weeks at number one. It topped the charts in 23 countries. It is now diamond-certified in the US with over a billion Spotify streams — and it had originally been released as a throwaway summer promotional double with “OMG,” not even intended as the lead single.

The song was almost entirely unlike anything Cabello had attempted in her two previous solo releases, which had stalled commercially after her departure from Fifth Harmony in December 2016. The writing team — Cabello, Tamposi, Brian Lee, Andrew Watt, Louis Bell, Pharrell Williams, and Frank Dukes — built the track around Dukes’ minimal piano riff and Cabello’s instinct to lean into her Cuban roots. Pharrell contributed the pre-chorus, which he sang in the studio himself to demonstrate the phrasing. Getting Young Thug on the feature was Cabello’s own decision — she wanted someone unconventional, nobody radio would have predicted. “I felt like he would bring just the right flavor,” she told NPR. His verse, largely unintelligible on first listen, provides exactly the untamed, off-kilter contrast that the precision-engineered pop production needed to feel alive.

Cabello had wanted to name her debut album The Hurting. The Healing. The Loving. After “Havana” hit, she changed the title to simply Camila. Her first two solo singles didn’t even make the final track listing. The song, as co-writer Brian Lee put it, was irreplaceable — “If she doesn’t do it, you can’t just give it away.” The music video, directed by Dave Meyers — whose credits include Kendrick Lamar’s “HUMBLE.” — was filmed in Los Angeles dressed as 1950s Havana, with Lele Pons and Noah Centineo in supporting roles and Cabello playing multiple versions of herself. It won Video of the Year at the 2018 MTV VMAs. A Daddy Yankee remix followed in November 2017, translating the first verse entirely into Spanish.

Camila debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 in January 2018. The success of “Havana” was so complete it retroactively repositioned everything around it — not just Cabello’s album and image, but the broader appetite for Latin-influenced pop in the American mainstream that “Despacito” had begun cracking open that same summer. Cabello performed the song at the 61st Grammy Awards in February 2019 alongside Ricky Martin, J Balvin, Young Thug, and jazz trumpeter Arturo Sandoval — a performance that situated it firmly in a lineage stretching back through Cuban music history.

Cabello was direct about what the song meant to her identity: “It was the first time I’d done something that sounds like me. It felt like I was finally speaking my own language.” Born Karla Camila Cabello Estrabao in Havana in 1997, she had left Cuba at six years old, moving first to Mexico City, then to Miami. The line “half of my heart is in Havana” was not a pop conceit — it was a fact she had carried since childhood and never quite found a way to say until Frank Dukes played that piano loop.

Some songs arrive fully formed, as if they were always waiting to be found. “Havana” debuted at number 99, spent five months reaching the top, and then spent years at the top of streaming charts, wedding playlists, and radio rotations across the world. “It was too easy,” Tamposi said in the studio. She was right — but only because Cabello had finally stopped trying to be anything other than herself. That’s always the hardest and easiest thing at the same time.

The clip won Video of the Year at the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards. The former Fifth Harmony star was also named Artist of the Year during the ceremony.