Most of what’s published about Cardi B’s father is unsourced, and a fair amount of it is wrong. What holds up comes from what his own daughter has said, spread across a decade of interviews and posts.
Carlos Almรกnzar’s birthday isn’t March 19, 1958, the date that shows up on nearly every page written about him. His daughter, Cardi B, gave the real one in a tweet from 2018, and it names a different month. Her birthday is October 11, his is November 12, and her mother’s is December 13. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, in order. She pointed out the pattern herself, in passing, years before anyone was asking.
Carlos Almรกnzar, often shortened online to Carlos Alman, is a retired New York City taxi driver and the father of Cardi B and her younger sister, Hennessy Carolina Almรกnzar. He has never given an interview, and he isn’t on social media. He has also never corrected anything written about him. What is known about him comes almost entirely from things his daughter has said, usually in passing, rarely as the point of what she was saying.
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A birthday nobody checked
The March 19 date traces back to a fan-run wiki page, not to any outlet that reported on him, and it has spread across dozens of sites since, usually without a source attached. The same page gives his full name as Carlos Alberto Almรกnzar Marsan, a detail copied just as often.
Neither has ever been checked against anything he’s said, because he’s never said anything. The one time Cardi had to publicly deny a false claim about her father, in 2020, she gave his name herself: Carlos Julio Almanzar.
What happened to his job
Carlos drove a cab in New York for close to three decades after moving to the city in 1990. In a 2016 interview with The Fader, a not-yet-famous Cardi B talked about wanting to buy her father a bodega so he could quit driving. He was still working then. There’s no clean retirement date on record, but the closest thing to one is a tweet from December 2017, a few months after “Bodak Yellow” made her a star, in which Cardi wrote that her dad “don’t even work nomore.”
He didn’t go quiet about the job once he left it. In June 2019, after a television documentary detailed how deep in debt many New York cab drivers had gone, Cardi wrote that her father was still campaigning for drivers’ pay, long after he’d stopped driving himself.
Marriage, two daughters, and the numbers Cardi has given
Cardi B was born in October 1992, and her sister Hennessy Carolina followed in December 1995, both to Carlos and his then-wife, Clara Almรกnzar, who he’d married in the early 1990s. The couple separated when Cardi was 13. Cardi confirmed that herself in 2022, saying she wasn’t especially upset about it at the time because it meant more freedom. She’s also said, going back to at least 2017, that her father has eight children in total, and that she and Hennessy are the only two who share a mother.
“My dad has eight kids, and we all get along.” Cardi B, Vogue, December 2019
Not everything about the family needed correcting. Hennessy’s name has a real story behind it: Carlos liked Hennessy cognac, and named his younger daughter after it. Cardi’s own childhood nickname, Bacardi, came later, when friends paired it with her sister’s liquor-themed name, long before she shortened it to Cardi B.
The same gap, at a much higher cost
A wrong birthday is a small problem. What’s happened to Carlos three times since 2020 is a different one. Because he has never spoken publicly, there has never been anyone to contradict a false claim about him except his daughter, and the same false claim, a fabricated criminal record, has come back three separate times.
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| May 2020 | A rumor claimed Carlos had a 1988 conviction. Cardi denied it on X, naming her father Carlos Julio Almanzar and repeating that he immigrated in 1990. |
| September 2023 | An account tied to Nicki Minaj’s fanbase repeated a similar claim. Cardi denied it again, noting that convicted offenders have to register annually. |
| January 2026 | A fabricated screenshot claimed the AI chatbot Grok had confirmed a 1993 conviction in Nassau County. Billboard reported that Grok itself denied ever generating the claim once it was fact-checked, calling the screenshot fabricated. |
Each time, her answer has come back to the same two points: he has never been arrested in the United States, and given his immigration status, a real conviction would likely have led to deportation. She made both points again in January, calling the screenshot fake within hours of it spreading.
A few things she has mentioned, unprompted
He taught Cardi to eat tomatoes whole, like an apple, with a pinch of salt first, when she was a child. She still does it.
He surfaces in public rarely enough that there’s only one clear sighting of him on record: April 10, 2018, when photographer Johnny Nunez caught him at Cardi’s Gold Album release party in New York, standing near his daughter and, in one frame, next to rapper N.O.R.E.
Two months later, on Father’s Day, Cardi called him her “personality twin.”
A year after that, in June 2019, a reporter from Univision’s entertainment show “El Gordo y La Flaca” tried to interview Carlos on the street without asking first. Cardi cut the interview short and told the crew not to film her father, saying he doesn’t travel with security.
