THE

GLORY

OF

MIAMI

Lucy and Ricky, a pair of Dalmatians, scamper down to the dock and bark at the boat. Estefan’s husband and manager, Emilio, got the dogs to cheer up his wife during her recovery from a March 1990 accident in which a truck slammed into her tour bus on a snowy Pennsylvania turnpike. Estefan was thrown to the floor and knew instantly that she’d broken her back. Now she has a pair of eight-inch steel rods along her spinal cord, and she avoids straight-backed chairs, which butt up against the screws that hold the rods in place.

Estefan’s speedy recovery – she recently concluded a 13month concert tour that began a year after the accident that nearly ended her career – surprised nobody who knew the shy young girl who recreated herself as a superstar, under the tutelage of her husband. But Emilio Estefan is not the manipulative Svengali of show business melodramas. Rather, he’s a street-wise entrepreneur who had the good fortune to fall in love with a sheltered flower who was ready to bloom.

This afternoon, Emilio is entertaining radio programmers at Estefan Enterprises, a regally appointment office and studio complex in southwest Miami. Emilio is known as a practiced politician and a shrewd deal-maker. As his guests enjoy a round of Cuban coffee, he takes a private call from Charles Koppelman, the "K" of SBK Records.

"Hey, Charles," says Emilio, "you should be a happy man, no?" Emilio is managing a young singer, Jon Secada, who has a new record on SBK featuring background vocals by Gloria. "Radio is wild about the song, and we’re getting all sorts of press." Emilio pauses to let Koppelman respond. "Great, Charles, we’ll keep on pumping."

Gloria Estefan, 33, is happy to let her husband take care of business. He stopped performing with Miami Sound Machine in 1982 to focus on breaking the group out of the Latin market and to care for the couple’s 11-year-old-son, Nayib, when Gloria was on tour. But after the runaway success of Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine’s 1987 album Let It Loose kept Estefan on the road for 16 months, she insisted that future tours once more include the entire family.

The singer trusts her husband to consult her on important decisions. "If it’s something I feel strongly about," says Gloria, "Emilio knows not to push it. Pepsi used to sponsor out tours, and we worked with the company on this tour. But Coke offered me serious, serious money to sponsor our tour and also to do a commercial.

"Now to Emilio, who’s a businessman, this is an unbelievable offer. But I said, ‚Look, I’m not going to do it.‘ The reason I did a Pepsi commercial was because I needed a sponsor. But I don’t like doing commercials, and I will not turn into the soft drink slut."

She also nixed the idea for a Gloria Estefan doll, ignoring Nayib, who said, "C’mon, Mom, it’ll be neat to have a doll." Estefan firmly held her ground. "I could just see the accessories – and ambulance, a stretcher, and little rods in her back," she says.

None of which is to imply that Estefan doesn’t maximize her profitable career. When regulations were enacted to preserve the Art Deco buildings in a once seedy area of Miami Beach, she made sure the couple bought real estate. And she has always been ready to schmooze with deejays, reporters, and anybody else who can help her sell records and concert tickets.

Estefan remembers one early tour of Puerto Rico. "There must have been 150 stations over there," she says, "and we hiked up to one on top of a mountain. There were no doors and no windows, and a cow was on the front lawn. The whole station consisted of a guy with a table, a microphone, and an antenna."

These days, Estefan is more likely to do interviews that are fed to radio and television stations via satellite. And instead of massaging the ego of a smalltime deejay, the Estefans will invicte Dick Clark over for a spin on their boat. (Clark, incidentally, tell in love with Lucy and Ricky, and has requested a puppy from Lucy’s upcoming litter.)

"I’m an example of a Cuban American who’s different from my mother or others of that generation," understates Estefan. "Cubans who’ve grown up in the United States have the best of both worlds because we’ve been inspired by the business mind and the unbelievable freedom of the Anglo world, but we have a lot of our own ethnic flavor, especially in Miami."

A similar balance defines the source of Gloria Estefan’s musical success: her Latin roots are tempered by the pop sensibility of somebody who got goose bumps when, at age six, she first heard Gerry and the Pacemakers sing "Ferry Cross the Mersey." Still, in the early eighties, Estefan and Miami Sound Machine were stars in Latin America, but virtually unknown by the mainstream pop audience. "In Latin America," says Estefan, "we were known as a North American pop group who sang in Spanish, and that helped because people there are nationalistic about their music. Local hits don’t often cross borders."

Miami Sound Machine found success in Latin America by being foreign yet familiar. And similarly, when group members became mainstream stars with 1985‘s "Conga," they owed their success to a sound that was exotic yet not alien. Hardcore fans of Latin music dismiss Miami Sound Machine as a pop group, and Gloria Estefan is the first to agree. She’s Latin Lite, a singer-songwriter who owes as much to Karen Carpenter as Celia Cruz, and whose live performances reflect aerobic exercise more than artistic angst.

As Miami Sound Machine racked up hits like "Bad Boy", "1-2-3", and "Words Get in the Way", Estefan emerged as the star. And as more energy was devoted to sculpting her image, the Cuban princess evolved into a sleek pop icon. But in truth, the transformation had begun in 1975, when Gloria Fajardo sang a few Cuban standards with Emilio Estefan’s group, the Latin Boys, at a wedding. Two weeks later, she tried out for the band.

"I went with my grandma, my mom, and my sister to this tiny apartment where Emilio lived with his parents," she recalls. "The band was in the living room and the neighbors were dancing outside." Gloria – and Emilio – passed the audition.

The group, renamed Miami Sound Machine, was a weekend hooby that, along with her studies at the University of Miami, helped Gloria shed what felt like the weight of the world. Her family had emigrated to Miami before she turned two, and almost immediately, her father, Jose Manuel Fajardo, returned to Cuba to fight in the Bay of Pigs. He was captured – by a cousin – and jailed for more than 18 months. Back in Miami, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and volunteered for Vietnam, where he was exposed to the defoilant Agent Orange. Fajardo returned home a proud but broken man, suffering from a degenerative neurological disease that led to his slow, painful death in 1980.

Throughout his illness, Gloria would run home from school to care for her father and younger sister while her mother, Gloria, worked as a clerk and studied to become a schoolteacher. Though saddened by the family situation, Gloria contained her grief. Instead of crying, she’d retreat to her room, where she’d pick up her guitar and sing. Today, in the music room of her house, Estefan pulls out the Spanish guitar her parents gave her at age 12. She still uses it to write songs.

"I never knew my dad," says Estefan, who studied psychology in college as a way to work out her problems, though she had already learned music was good therapy. "For me," she says, "learning to perform was a matter of breaking through all those years of masking my emotions, a way to get rid of things that shouldn’t have been there. Music helped me learn to be happy."

Yet Estefan never entirely trusted her good fortune. When she and Emilio bought the hosue on Star Island, Gloria, sensitive to the needs of the handicapped, insisted that an elevator be installed. So when the truck hit the bus, Estefan cried out in pain, but not surprise. "I wasn’t thinking about whether I’d ever get back on stage," she says of the weeks following the accident. "All I cared about was walking. My dad was in a chair for 14 years. I knew what that would mean for my son and husband. All I cared about was getting my life back, being able to take a shower by myself, to tie a shoe."

On this morning, Estefan has run six miles. Before the accident, she exercised to tone a body that, long ago, was padded by the efforts of a grandmother who equated affection with appetite. Now, if Estefan doesn’t work out for a few days, she’s stiff as steel. "It’s a small price to pay," she says, "for the ability to walk around."

Gloria Estefan, pop star, is apolitical, but knows a Cuban American success story can’t help being an issue on the island where she was born. Recently, she spoke with a Cuban artist who told her how Fidel Castro’s secret police had broken into his home while he and some friends were listening to one of her songs. The tape was confiscated, and beatings followed.

"I suppose it’s some kind of poetic justice," says the tough-as-nails daughter of a Cuban American soldier, "that by doing the ‚Conga‘ I can unnerve the man my father despised."

© All rights reserved by Elle, June 1992