Ten days before he died, Mauro Menéndez posted a series of photographs from a recording studio. The images show him facing synthesisers and mixing consoles, headphones on, absorbed in work. He captioned them with two words: “REAL MUSIC.” It was 7 July, and the 30-year-old DJ and producer, known professionally as MAAHEZ, was in full creative motion. There was no public sign of the pneumonia that, according to multiple reports in the Spanish-language press, had already taken hold.

By the night of 16 July, Menéndez was in Barbados, having travelled from his base in the United States to attend a baseball game. His mother, the Cuban-born actress Aylín Mujica, had asked him not to go. She urged him to rest and recover. He went anyway. Early reports, circulated by the journalist Mandy Fridmann and later confirmed by the family, indicate that the respiratory infection triggered a cardiac arrest. Menéndez died on the island, far from his home in Miami. Mujica, who was in Bogotá filming the Telemundo reality show Top Chef VIP, received a telephone call with the news and left the production immediately, flying to Barbados to identify her son’s body and begin the legal process of repatriation.

Menéndez was the eldest of Mujica’s three children, born when she was 19 to her first husband, the Cuban musician Osamu Menéndez. He grew up between Cuba and the United States and built a career in electronic music, releasing tracks that blended house, tech house, latin house and moombahton. Under the name MAAHEZ, he collaborated with artists such as DVBBS, Jenn Morel and San Pacho, and performed in clubs and festivals across the Americas and Europe. His work carried the influence of a family steeped in performance: his father is a rock guitarist and singer; his mother a telenovela star whose career took her from Havana to Mexico City and Miami. Yet Menéndez’s own path remained largely outside the television spotlight, rooted instead in the late-night circuits of dance music.

The death reverberated quickly through the Latin American entertainment industry. Maribel Guardia, the Costa Rican actress who lost her own son, Julián Figueroa, to a sudden cardiac arrest in 2023, posted a public message: “Hoy lloro contigo, querida Aylín Mujica. Ninguna madre debería despedir a un hijo.” Telemundo issued a statement offering condolences and asking for privacy. Laura Zapata, a Mexican actress and friend of Mujica, told the digital outlet Canela TV that she had spoken to her by phone: “Está destrozada,” she said — she is shattered. The most unvarnished reaction came from Osamu Menéndez, who wrote on Facebook: “Perdónenme, no puedo hablar, mi hijo Mauro murió anoche y estoy destrozado. Voy en el avión a buscar su cuerpo.”

Mujica herself remained largely silent, breaking it only to reply to a Telemundo post with five words: “Muchas gracias familia, sólo puedo decir que estoy devastada,” followed by a broken-heart emoji. The contrast between that spare message and the studio photographs from ten days earlier — a young man leaning into his craft, promising real music — now frames a private grief unfolding in public view. As the family worked to bring his body back to Miami, the image of a father on a plane, flying towards his son’s remains, became the starkest measure of the loss.