Michael Olivera García was born in Santa Clara, in the central provinces of Cuba, and came to music at ten through the classical percussion program at the city's Escuela Vocacional de Arte. He took a percussion-ensemble prize at the Santa Clara provincial festival in 1998 and graduated from the school in 2000, then moved to Havana for the Escuela Nacional de Arte, finishing there in 2005. His training was in the concert percussion repertoire rather than in a drum kit tradition, and the reading fluency that came with it is the thing collaborators mention first about him.

He was working professionally in Havana well before he graduated. From 2002 he played in the quintet of saxophonist Román Filiú, formerly of Irakere; 2003 brought regular work with trumpeter Alexander Brown's quartet and with the band of the scat singer Bobby Carcassés, and 2004 the trio of pianist Emilio Morales and the Cuba Jazz quartet of saxophonist Orlando Sánchez, alongside guitarist Jorge Luis Chicoy. That same year he served as an accompanying musician at the workshops Danilo Pérez conducted at Havana's Instituto Superior de Arte during the Jazz Plaza festival. In 2005 he joined trumpeter Yasek Manzano's band next to the veteran percussionist Changuito, and also joined the Afro-Cuban rock group Síntesis, first on congas, timbales and batá drums and later behind the kit. Two years into that run he took the interpretation prize at Jojazz, Havana's young-talent festival, and a Caracol award for music written for a children's television series. A Cubadisco followed in 2009 for the CD/DVD Señales, cited as best debut and best fusion album, which he drummed on. His work with Síntesis culminated in Traigo Para Dar (Egrem, 2010), a record he produced, recorded, mixed and programmed as well as playing drums, percussion and backing vocals on.

The connection that carried him out of Cuba was pianist Alfredo Rodríguez, whose jazz trio he first joined in 2007 and rejoined in 2011 after four years apart. Rodríguez had been signed by Quincy Jones, and Jones is credited as producer on both Rodríguez albums that carry Olivera: Sounds Of Space (Mack Avenue, 2012), where Olivera drums on seven of the eleven tracks with Francisco Mela taking the other two kit chairs, and The Little Dream (Mack Avenue, 2018), where he plays drums and percussion across the whole record. The two men have never been credited as fellow performers on anything; the association is that Jones produced records Olivera played on, and it took him onto stages at the North Sea Jazz Festival, Jazz à Vienne, Montreux, Montreal and the Blue Note rooms in New York and Tokyo. Out of the same orbit came a working trio with the Cameroonian bassist Richard Bona and Rodríguez, billed on festival programs from France to Norway as Bona & Alfredo Rodríguez featuring Michael Olivera. That group has toured since at least 2022 without recording.

Settled in Madrid from the early 2010s, Olivera became one of the busiest drummers in Spanish jazz, and the record dates pile up from 2012 onward: the Vistel brothers' quintet and Jorge Vistel's Cimarrón (Inner Circle Music, 2014), the Edgar van Asselt Vistel Project's Tierra A La Vista and Luis Verde's In Lak'ech Hala K'in, both for Fresh Sound New Talent, Maikel Vistel's Pasos, and two albums for bassist Pablo Martín Caminero. On saxophonist Antonio Lizana's Oriente (Sony Music, 2017) he is credited as producer as well as drummer. His longest-running Spanish association is the trio of pianist Daniel García, which signed to the German label ACT and made Travesuras (2019), Vía De La Plata (2021) and Wonderland (2024) with Reinier Elizarde "El Negrón" on bass, records that put Olivera next to guests including Anat Cohen and Ibrahim Maalouf. In 2019 he was the drummer of the Paquito D'Rivera Septet on its European "Cariberian" tour, and the live album drawn from it, Cariberian, appeared on Altafonte in 2021 under Paquito D'Rivera's name with Pepe Rivero directing the band.

His own catalog began in Madrid with the Michael Olivera Group. Ashé (Little Red Corvette Records, 2016) takes its title from the Yoruba word for divine blessing and sets Cuban and Andalusian material next to a closing tribute to John Coltrane, an arrangement of "Acknowledgement" from A Love Supreme; the band was Munir Hossn on bass and guitar, Marco Mezquida on piano, Ariel Brínguez on saxophones and Miryam Latrece singing. Oasis followed in 2017 with a larger front line and Yonathan Avishai at the piano. In 2020 he assembled The Cuban Jazz Syndicate, a sextet of Cuban musicians in Spain whose first album, Y llegó la luz (Olivera Producciones, 2021), he wrote, arranged and produced almost entirely himself, and which carries a spoken tribute from D'Rivera at its midpoint and a piece dedicated to Tito Puente near the end. Géminis arrived in 2023, and Los Palos Gozadores in March 2024, a trio record with pianist Alex Conde and bassist Gastón Joya built on the meeting point of flamenco forms and Latin jazz: Ernesto Lecuona's "La Comparsa," Astor Piazzolla's "Oblivion," a rumba on the Joaquín Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez, and Bob Marley's "Could You Be Loved."

The most recent addition is Heavy Drops, released February 28, 2025, where he is the drummer and percussionist across a record marketed as a bass-and-drums duo with the Israeli double bassist Adam Ben Ezra. The two cut the foundation live over three days at Camaleon Music Studio in Madrid with Frank Lozano engineering, after which Ben Ezra, who wrote, arranged and produced the album, layered his own overdubs at his studio in São Luís, Portugal.

Olivera's playing sits on Cuban rhythmic foundations and is built to travel. The batá, conga and timbal vocabulary he learned in Havana comes through the kit rather than being set beside it, which is why he can hold a danzón or a comparsa figure and a straight jazz ride pattern in the same chorus. What separates him from the many excellent Cuban drummers working in Spain is that he writes and produces. He composed and arranged nearly all of Y llegó la luz, produced Antonio Lizana's Oriente and Miryam Latrece's Una Necesidad, and handled production, recording, mixing and programming on Síntesis's Traigo Para Dar. The flamenco strand is not decoration either: "Trilogía III: Andaluza" on Ashé, "Moaning por Bulerías" on Los Palos Gozadores, and the long-running work with Lizana, Chano Domínguez and Santiago Lara are the record of a Cuban musician who moved to Spain and took the local idiom seriously enough to write inside it. Chucho Valdés, endorsing The Cuban Jazz Syndicate, described the result as a fusion of Afro-Cuban music, contemporary jazz and flamenco elements, which is an accurate summary of what the group actually does.