PULLING UP to the main gate in a rented Ford Escort is not the best way to announce your arrival at a place called Star Island. A plausible story might convince the rock-jawed security guard to wave you through, but that won’t do you much good if you’re not expected at one of the estates, each equipped with a metal gate and an intercom used to screen uninvited visitors. Don Johnson used to live on Star Island; Gloria Estefan still does.

The night I parked my Escort in the Estefan driveway, behind Gloria’s Jaguar and husband Emilio’s Rolls, was one week before Christmas and one night after I’d flown in to Miami. The big local news story that day was the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president of Haiti, one of the Caribbean’s poorest, most oppressed nations. This was good news in Little Haiti, the section of Miami where most of those exiled by deposed dictator Papa Doc Duvalier live. In a city where race riots are more common than street parties, the joyous celebration of Haiti’s first free election was a welcome civic event.

If Miami’s Haitian community, dispossessed and still struggling, is one extreme of the city’s emigre population, its half-million Cubans, proudly prosperous, represent the other. And Gloria Estefan, the Cuban-born pop star, is a perfect example of how they’ve prospered: From her modest start in the mid-‘70s, as a shy teen singing Top 40 covers on Miami’s wedding-and-quinces (sweet 15) party circuit, Estefan has become this country’s most popular Latin performer. Multiplatinum sales of her albums – Primitive Love, Let It Loose, Cuts Both Ways – have paid for the Estefans’ $5 million estate on a choice stretch of Biscayne Bay, as well as the construction of Estefan Enterprises, a tasteful office/recording studio on an otherwise generic strip dotted with Sizzlers, 7-Elevens, and car dealerships.

The polyglot pot that is 1991 Miami – blacks, whites, and Hispanics including Cubans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Colombians, and Puerto Ricans – didn’t exist in 1960 when Estefan arrived in the United States as a 16-month-old infant. "I remember my mother going to places and there being signs, ‘No kids, no pets, no Cubans,’ " recalls Estefan, wearing nonartfully ripped jeans and a leather jacket that is more fashion accessory than functional in the evening’s tropical breeze. "It was a very small community [then], it wasn’t the Miami of the ‘20s that had gambling. It had a more calm-old-retiremenswamp-Siminole-Indian feel about it."

But if Miami’s past is old Anglo, its present is young Hispanic. No longer discriminated against, Cubans now run the city. Race relations have, if anything, worsened, and even the city’s Hispanic population is less than united. After a Puerto Rican drug dealer was beaten to death by a rainbow coalition of cops (three blacks, two Cubans, one white), the Puerto Rican community of Wynwood rioted when the court case against the police ended in a mistrial.

All of which makes Estefan a particularly interesting study. Throughout the rest of the world, she’s an international star. In Miami, she’s a local success story, someone as popular in the low-rent district of Little Haiti as in the high-mortgage world of Star Island. Her group, Miami Sound Machine, even has a quiet residential street named in its honor. (It’s just a few blocks away from a more well-known thoroughfare, Jose Canseco Boulevard.) Before Miami Sound Machine became successful in the United States, it was popular in Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil. In many ways, Estefan is a bilingual role model for the grater Hispanic community. As she explains it, "Everywhere I go, it’s not that they look at me as a Cuban, they look at me as an Hispanic. That’s great. I do think it’s necessary to be unified and help each other out. Before the Cubans came [to Miami], there was no Hispanic population, so it was very difficult. Now, you don’t even have to speak English to get around."

Though Estefan has often sung in her native tongue – last year she released an album of Spanish ballads – her most popular recordings have been in English. That’s mostly true of her new album, Into the Light, with a notable exception. The album features two versions of one song: "Coming Out of the Dark" and ist Spanish language equivalent, "Desde La Oscuridad." Though Estefan has done this at least once before, she says there was a special Though Estefan has done this at least once before, she says there was a special reason for including a Spanish version of "Coming Out of the Dark." "I wanted to make sure the Hispanic audience understood it. It’s the only song [on the album] that deals directly with the accident."

Estefan is so matter-of-fact on the subject of "the accident" that it’s easy to underplay its seriousness. On March 20, 1990, on the way to a concert in Pennsylvania, the tour bus Estefan was traveling in was struck by a truck trailer. Her husband, Emilio, suffered a cut hand; her then nine-year-old son, Nayib, broke his collarbone. Gloria was injured more seriously, suffering a broken back and nerve damage. It took four hours of surgery to realign her spine, and today her back is supported by two eight-inch rods that will remain there the rest of her life.

Nine months later, she relaxes in her backyard and casually discusses the completion of a new album, a video clip that features her dancing, and plans for a world tour that begins in March. As miraculous as it seems, Estefan is reluctant to cast her recovery as anything more (or less) than the result of personal discipline, the help of a physical therapist, and the loving hands of friends and family, especially husband Emilio’s. "Emilio didn’t leave the house for three months [after the accident]. He stayed with me completely, every minute. He was too destroyed to work himself, so he devoted himself to me. I literally couldn’t go anywhere by myself because I’d either fall over to the side, or trip, or stub my toe because I couldn’t lift my left foot."

"The first two months were really hard because I was still in a lot of pain. I just didn’t feel like I was ready to start again. My sole objective was to get back physically, but after two months I really felt all right. Things were so much better than they had been. When I started working on the music, it really helped because it took me away from being just a ‘recovering injured person’ to being creative again."

"To me, music has always been therapeutic, an escape, a great way to vent emotions and feelings."

These days, one of her knees, also injured in the crash, hurts more than her back, though she’s still given an occasional, unpleasant reminder of the rods in her back. "If I lean up against something really hard, it’s not the rods that I feel but the screws, not the bottom ones but the ones right at the top."

This is about as close as Estefan comes to self-pity. "I can’t play football, I can’t skydive," she admits with a laugh when asked if there’s anything she can’t do. "My doctor says it’s completely up to me, that every patient is different. When I left the hospital, he said, ‘I really can’t tell you what to expect. Some of [your physical problems] might go away, some of them might not.’ I sustained nerve damage, and that’s done. What’s done is done. But I think people are going to be surprised by how well I’m doing."

If the accident had any positive effects, Estefan allows, it did her more time at home with her son. This theme – a family brought closer together by adversity – is common to the point of cliche, but in the Estefans’ case, family does seem to play an uncommonly important role. Emilio might not be co-producing Gloria’s records today if the singer’s mother hadn’t introduced the two when Gloria was still in her teens. Gloria’s sister, Becky, is office manager of Estefan Enterprises and lives in the house Gloria lived before she married Emilio. When Miami Sound Machine goes on tour this spring, Gloria plans to enlist a cousin to act as her personal assistant.

Though he died 10 years ago and spent much of Gloria’s youth hospitalized, Gloria’s father had a crucial influence on her life. Before Jose Fajardo brought his wife and daughter to Miami in 1960, he was a motorcycle escort cop for the First Lady of deposed Cuban president Fulgencio Batista. An ardent supporter of la lucha – the Cuban exile effort to overthrow Castro – he was captured in the Bay of Pigs invasion, released following negotiations by President Kennedy, and enlisted in the U.S. Army, which promptly packed him off to Vietnam. He joined in the belief that if he served in the U.S. Army, he could later count on government support for a second invasion of Cuba. Instead, his military career ended when he was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis, though Gloria believes that her father’s exposure to Agent Orange may have contributed to his slow death. Sick from the time Gloria was 10, he finally died in 1980. "I’d go and see him every day, and he really didn’t know who I was. It was good in a way [that he finally died] because I don’t think he could have taken it [any longer]. He was very good looking, was an athlete who had been in the Pan-Am Games, and had played volleyball. I [still] have the bronze medal that the Cuban team won."

It’s not surprising to hear Estefan say that, as a result of her father’s experience. "I hate politics," repeating the phrase twice for emphasis. Even so, she admits she’d like to see another Cuban leader in place of Castro. "I’m not one of those people who thinks Cuba will be free right away. I hope to God that Cuba is freed. The only thing I hope is that there’s no violence, because I know that man is not too well."

"I do think it’ll change because people won’t be able to take it. The poverty down there is crucial. People are hungry."

She’s done interviews and her music is played on Radio Marti, which is broadcast to Cuba, but Estefan says she will never perform there as long as Castro is in power. "I would perform in a free Cuba, but not with the regiment that is there now. He would use it to his advantage. I don’t think it would solve anything. What’s it gonna do, incite the people? And then, if some bloodshed would happen, I would feel responsible. I want to inspire people, but I don’t want to get people in trouble."

© All rights reserved by Request

zurück