Basking in Florida’s almost blood temperature waters, with the ice cream-coloured Miami Beach architecture in the background, the 50-acre, man-made haven of Star Island is among the world’s most exclusive addresses. Not that you need local approval to live there, as in Jersey, but, in the spirit of American democracy, you’ll need the sort of funding that won’t involve the Abbey National. It’s the implausible-looking wealth of Miami Vice made real, and offers upward of £1 million an acre for the 27 residential plots will be considered. Then, if you want an architect-designed sprawling Spanish-style mansion, with swimming pool and outbuildings for staff, add on a few more "mill".

What you’re buying is privacy and high-level security. It can only be reached via a guarded bridge or by sea – speedboats and seaplanes "park up" like less privileged neighbourhoods cars – and although each plot has its own sea frontage there are no beaches, so private jetties provide sole access. Some of these structures are permanently occupied by large men wearing sunglasses. As well as the owners of Miami’s swankier nightclubs, successful doctors and (until recently and entirely appropriately) Don Johnson, residents include Anatasio Somoza, the deposed president of Nicaragua, and a few characters so shadowy even longstanding neighbours have no idea who they are or how they make their money.

It’s also where Gloria Estefan hangs her hat. And her original works of art. And the array of platinum discs awarded to her and Miami Sound Machine, the group founded by husband Emilio. After buying the site of the elite Miami Beach Yacht Club, they razed the suitably lucurious club house and spent a couple of years and $5 million on, naturally, an architect-designed, sprawling Spanish-style mansion with obligatory swimming pool and so on. As well as a status-boosting post code, Star Island brought added sparkle to the Estefans‘ leisure time: a wet bike (a costly cross between a motorcycle and a water ski) for her and a Scarab class powerboat for him (it can, apparently, cover the 90-odd miles to the Bahamas in 40 minutes). "About five years ago," she offers by way of explanation, "we decided that if we ever moved, the only place we’d go would be Star Island."

A pretty precocious statemtn from a band that hadn’t had even the merest taste of pop chart success, but where they lived at the time was none too shabby. The des res in one of Miami’s better suburbs (a stuccoed, walled mansion), had considerable sentimental value – in 1983, the street on which it stand (10^th Terrace) was renamed Miami Sound Machine Boulevard. Still three years before they would be voted Billboard’s Best New Act, this remarkable gesture by Mayor Steve Clark accompanied his declaration of August 19 as Miami Sound Machine Day – not a public holiday but on a par with the Key To The City, so not to be sniffed at – and around the same time, by request of the Reagans, they played at a White House function.

As of last year, when the Gloria Estfan And Miami Sound Machine album Anything For You (titled Let It Loose in the USA) was among the best sellers (nearly six million worldwide, one million in the UK alone – 100,000 more than George Michael’s Faith), the group took their place in The Big League. To cement this position, last month’s LP, Cuts Both Ways, entered the charts at Number 1 and stayed there three weeks with total sales of over a million. But theirs was hardly a textbook apprenticeship. At a Miami Beach rehearsal studio, Gloria Estefan takes a break from preparing for the upcoming world tour (the eight-show UK leg has sold 60,000 tickets) to recount the period between the band’s formation in 1975 and their first "Anglo market" hit in 1984 (remember "Doc-doc-doc-doc-doctor Beat"?). It becomes clear they completely bypassed pop’s traditional nursery slopes. Indeed, for nine years Miami Sound Machine’s blend of US pop and Cuban rhythms (the original line-up were all Cuban whose families left after the revolution in 1960) was Latin America’s best kept secret.

Culturally, Latin America extends into a large area of the USA, where some 20 million residents grew up speaking Spanish. Nowhere, save certain parts of LA, is there a higher concentrations than Miami, with its immigrant Central Americans, relocated Puerto Ricans (the island is part of the USA) and massive numbers of Cuban-in-exile. Although official figures show 59 per cent of the city’s population speak English as a second language, everybody I met – from Latin-types to the blue-eyed blonde on the hotel reception and the young black taxi driver with the state of the art "sculptured" haircut – switched effortlessly into Spanish if necessary. Public notices are bi-lingual and a recent Cuban-led city referendum to make Spanish the first language was only narrowly defeated.

Naturally, there’s enormous local demand for Salsa bands, and in the early 70s, Emilio Estefan (who worked for Bacardi by day and played the accordion in Cuban restaurants at night) put one together, first as The Miami Cuban Boys, then later The Miami Latin Boys. In 1975 they played a wedding at which 18-year-old Gloria Fajardo was a guest, and even then he was calling attention to himself by attempting Anglo/Latin fusion.

"They were doing Latin standards, and I wasn’t taking much notice, until Emilio played Do The Hustle (a lushly orchestrated disco hit of the day) on the accordion! I thought, Boy, this guy must really have guts, because it was a very traditional affair. They obviously weren’t just into Latin music, so when he asked me up to sing a couple of songs – we’d met once before and he knew I sang – I agreed. Because I knew everybody there I got a standing ovation and Emilio was so impressed he asked me to join his group."

They played house parties, weddings and Quinces (traditional "coming out" parties for 15-year-old Cuban girls), and a programme of internal cultural exchange took place. Gloria was born in Havana, but came in The American Way. (This is common for families from post-revolution Cua, as it seems to constitute an anti-Castro statement). The sum total of her musical experience was the pop Top 40 – this was the KC & The Sunshine Band disco ear – and ballads played on her acoustic guitar. Her input on vocals and knowledge of the style allowed them to do the pop music they wanted to experiment with (prior to this they had no singer and were limited to uptempo Latin instrumentals), and they taught her to sing the Salsa she’d never so much as listened to before and to augment the all-important percussion section.

The name Miami Sound Machine came in 1976 when they recorded their first album, named after the band, for the local Audio Latino label. Unlike their stage sets, which contained a sprinkling of current pop hits, it was all original material, sung half in Spanish an half in English, and a balance of pop, ballads and Salsa. A mild local hit, the LP sold well in other US Hispanic communities, where the competition from bands doing much the same thing is much less intense than in Miami and singing in English seems more readily accepted. On the strength of this, it crossed the border into all areas of South America to become the year’s top Latin-market album. Audio Latino’s accounting was somewhat hazy, but sales of half a million is a reasonable estimate – several hundred thousand in the USA and between 30 and 50,000 in every South American country. Phenomenal figures for under-populated, depressed territories, where 10,000 would get you a best-seller. Huge returns are possible only in Brazil (pop. 100 million), and there MSM’s problem was that the native language is Portuguese and there’s a strong Samba tradition.

MSM became instant stars south of the Rio Grande, where promoters and distributors find it more economically viable to import acts and records from the USA, thus local record companies devote little efort to domestic talent. While meeting the demand for original pop music sung in Spanish and catering for Latin tastes with Salsa and ballads, they could also be marketed as Big American Stars as they had the required English language material. Anything lost in misdirected royalties, was recouped with performance fees (paid directly to manager Emilio) as they lived a bizarre double (or maybe triple) life: "We all had days jobs. I was a Spanish/French interpreter for Miami Customs & Immigration and Emilio was now an executive at Bacardi, yet we’d be taking time off to go and top the bill in 60,000 seater stadiums in Mexico or Chile. Then, because of our status in Miami, we’d come home to play for 150 people at a wedding reception."

In 1978, Gloria and Emilio married (she then gave up work), moved into the 10^th Terrace hosue and a second LP, called Rio with a strong Samba feel, cemented their Hispanic celebrity by breaking them in Brazil. It also made more of an impression in their hometown, allowing them to stop playing private functions and start doing small concerts – "By then we were chargin top dollar for weddings, a lot of money, but we wanted the people to be there for us, not us to be there for the people." In 1980 Emilio became full-time (managing, playing and producing) and the group financed and released a third album themselves. A legal battle with Audio Latino ensued, settled only when CBS International stepped in to sign the group that were always topping of at least one South American chart.

At the new label, less creative corporate accounting swelled the Estefan bank balance but artists advancement was put on hold. CBS honed down MSM’s marketing strategy to exclude any Salsa-flavoured music. The next four years brought a string of pop songs sung exclusive in Spanish.

"We weren’t in control of anything, and they saw us as concering the Hispanic pop market. They’d give us covers of US pop hits in Spanish, I’d write lyrics in English and they’d be translated (she admits her Spanish is only conversational; she hasn’t sufficient grammar to write it properly) and we had producers who stopped us using Latin rhythms. They kept telling us that wasn’t what we were good at!"

But sales figures remained defiantly buoyant. It was then that Mayor Clark, who travelled extensively in Latin America, saw their success and decided they presented a "more positive" image of his town than headline-grabbing race riots and the drug-related "slayings" relentlessly fictionalised by Miami Vice and Scarface. Also, they gained sufficient leverage to chose two songs fro 1984‘s A Toda Maquina album. Both were written by drummer Enrique Garcia, both were in English and one was Dr. Beat. It became the first MSM song to be played on Miami’s Anglo radio stations, was a New York club hit and reached Number 6 in the UK charts to give them their first hit anywhere outside Latin America.

Without affecting their Latino fan-base (the English language material has sold much better in South America). MSM were heartily embraced by the US pop market. The follow-up album, Primitive Love – their first entirely English set – went Top 20, their songs were used in the hit films Top Gun, Cobra, Stakeout and Three Men And A Baby and Emilio became an "in demand" producer, working with Clarence Clemons, Barry Manilow, Julio Iglesias, Kid Creole and, later, Britain’s Matt Bianco (the produced their Don’t Blame It On The Girl hit).

Anything For You (1988) brought them back to prominence in the UK – post-Dr. Beat development was arrested, she believes, by the follow-up single, Conga, the Cuban street dance song that was passed over by radio in the wake of the Club 18-30 joly-up Do The Conga, by the profoundly terrible Black Lace. But, most importantly, they were now Gloria Estefan And Miami Sound Machine. The svelte re-invention out front was so far removed from the slightly tubby, gawky proposition of before, it prompted rumours that Emilio had wired her jaws shut and brought in the cosmetic surgeon. All nonsense, she claims. The transformation, gradually achieved by abandoning the (largely fried) Cuban diet, seemed drastic over here because she hadn’t been seen for four years. The shift of focus was because she was the only member of the original line-up left (Emilio pulled out to produce and to ensure that touring wouldn’t take them both away from son Nayib, now eight) and to bring the operation in line with the popular trend for solo female singers. The current LP is simply by Gloria Estefan.

The instant succes of Cuts Both Ways, she believes, was not merely a stop-gap in the Whitney Houston market or the result of Madonna’s growing up and leaving behind the "not too girlie, but still groovy" record buyers: "Some years ago that might’ve been the case, but now both the industry and record buyers accept women artists as readily as men, so the market will continue to support as many good ones as come along. It will get even easier, as more and more get the confidence to take control."

For now though, Gloria Estefan is understandably happy with her lot. Apart from the Star Island address, and the luxury toys, the boats and the wetbikes, she’s achieved a 14-year-old ambiition to establish MSM’s music in her adopted country – one room of the house is set aside to store music industry awards, and she was invited to duet with Placido Domingo on his album Viva Goya (an operatic tribute to the painter). And both Emilio and Nayib will be coming on the world tour.

The only fleeting cloud in these almost impossibly blue skies came form her former homeland of Cuba. Although the records do a brisk trade on the black market there – "they call us MSM as nobody likes to actually say Miami" – she has no desire at all to attempt a Glasnost-style concert there. A view apparently shared by President Castro. At last year’s Pan American Games, when the band were chosen to perform at the closing ceremony, Cuba threatened to boycott the event and hinted that it could jeopardise thier hosting of the next Games if the group set foot on the stage. "But the officials were bhind us all the way, so we played and Cuba still attended. That we’re such a thorn in their side is really kind of poetic justice!"

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