Gloria Estefan’s Miami Virtue

Gloria Estefan remembers when she used to clutch the microphone and stare at her feet onstage. „I used to be very, very shy,“ she says.

But as lead singer for Miami Sound Machine, she has put her shyness behind her. There’s a Number One single, “Anything for You,” a Top Ten album, Let It Loose, a world tour in progress and a coveted slot on this fall’s Amnesty International tour.

Estefan, 30, never fathomed such a life as a Cuban exile growing up in Miami. She spent part of her youth caring for her father, who contracted a nerve disease while serving in Vietnam. She was raised mostly by her mother, who learned English when the family came to the United States and later earned a master’s degree, and by her grandmother, a woman who started a successful business while in her sixties and got her driver’s license at seventy-three.

“I’ve grown up with a very strong example that women can really do anything that they want to. I never really thought to be a performer. I planned on being a psychologist,” says Estefan, who graduated from the University of Miami in 1978. The band started “as a hobby. It just grew little by little. As I performed more, I opened up.”

While she travels the world, husband Emilio remains in Miami to stay with their seven-year-old son, Nayib, and handle production duties for the band.

“Emilio is a very well-adjusted, secure human being. And he has no qualms about his wife becoming more famous or anything like that,” she says.

The tours continue for MSM through the fall. And the shy girl who needed to be coaxed to sing in public fades further from memory.

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