Extending
Her Reach
Music
: With her English-language album, her HBO special, her Olympics theme song and her world tour. Cuban-Anglo-Miamian Gloria Estefan is truly global.I
n a restaurant in northern Spain, Gloria Estefan is negotiating a fine point of the modern concert tour. She is dressed simply, in a skintight gold turtleneck and jeans, her hair pulled back from her sharp features; smaller than you might expect, prettier, too. The issue is ne of time. She has directed her son, Nayib, 16, to be back at the hotel by midnight."Twelve-thirty?" he tries. Gloria and Emilio, her husband and manager, hold firm. They’re a little bit Cuban; he’s a little bit rock and roll. Twelve. "Twelve-thirty?" Nayib has on a Pearl Jam T-shirt, a ’90s answer to waving one’s freak flag. He appears to have a deep drawerful of such shirts. At another tour stop, Emilio borrows one celebrating the ghoulish band Marylin Manson. He is the jocular father, playing on the Spanish beach with their other child, Emily,2; his back reads, in huge garish type: WE HATE LOVE WE LOVE HATE. Gloria says Nayib keeps her up to date on current music. He adds a different flavor to the family’s multicultural stew. "What does Kiss do?" he asks Emily in Spanish. Emily rolls her head and waves her tongue.
THE WINNER
16% Crossover pop star Gloria Estefan topped the music voting. Not a huge surprise, but second place was: 14-year-old country new-comer LeAnn Rimes. Then came those ‚Macarena‘ folks, Los del Rio.
This is the traveling Estefan family revue, on the road for the first time in five years. The tour, Gloria says, is her last for a while; once Emily starts school, "there won’t be te opportunity emotionally to do this." They are an extended family, with nanny, tutor and trainer in tow. And like most families, they mark their days in negotiations and temptations. Last March Nayib was expelled from his tony Miami prep school for a phone prank. Now, on a yearlong trek across cultural lines and time zones, he and Emily are the steady points of reference. Gloria recently had a private audience with the King and Queen of Spain: "They’re very family-oriented; the king gave Emily one of his hankies." She met with President Clinton: "Emily woke up cranky." She performed the Olympics theme song, "Reach," in Atlanta. "My daughter had been all over that place where the bomb went off." Outside the restaurant, a handful of fans has started to gather on the sidewalk, most of them young, most of them female. They, too, are a part of the family negotiations. "I like the one in the plaid," says Nayib. He looks again. "They’re all in plaid." He’s off.
For Estefan, the tour caps a big and busy year. She released "Destiny," her first original English-language album since 1991. It is pure Gloria: lushly romantic, bedded in Latin rhythms – shiny but deceptively rich. Her HBO special. "Live From Miami," was among the top-rated programs on the network. She was invited, but declined, to sing at both political conventions. "I don’t want people who like how I sing to be affected by my political views," she says. Emilio, a former marketing executive for Bacardi, has been a whirlwind, producing pure salsa for Celia Cruz as well as three Madonna songs – pure whatever – for the "Evita" soundtrack. In Spain the audiences sing along in two languages, following Gloria from the aerobic disco of an early hit like "Conga" to an openly sentimental Colombian-stlye ballad. It is a relentlessly uplifting god time. And the crowds, too, have added their own cultural favors. The show here in La Coru is in a bullring, which to Gloria’s mind has its issues. At the Madrid ring, she says, "you could smell bull everywhere. They said, ‚They’re breeding as you [sing]‘ Oh, that’s a nice image. At least they’ll have some romantic music to do it by."
In his book, "Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban American Way." Gustavo Perez Firmat compares Gloria to the novelist Oscar Hijuelos: for all her Latin seasonings, she "takes enough distance from Cuban culture so as to assume it without conflict, pragmatically rather than existentially." Estefan is a deft creature of the hyphen. Her father, exiled after Castro’s revlution, joined the Bay of Pigs invasion, and his daughter remains outspoken against Fidel and communism. But she left Cuba at the age of 2, and her bearings are as much nrothern as Latin. "I don’t feel ne or the other totally. I was educated in the United States and too immersed in the culture to feel totally Cuban. At the same time, I’m too Cuban in my home life to be totally Anglo, whatever that is. I’m Miamian." Her English is better than her Spanish – she says she dreams in both languages – and her first key musical moment came from the British Invasion. "I heard [Gerry and the Pacemakers‘] ‘Ferry Across the Mersey‘ in a Laundromat, and my hair stood on end. To this day, whenever I hear the song I smell Laundromat."
La Coru , like most of Spain, is a late town, and by midnight the streets are just coming to life. "This place makes me sad for Cuba," Gloria says. "I think of them and I ask myself why they can’t be allowed to join the world." By midnight also, Nayib has returned to the hotel but remains outside, holding court with still more fans: pushng it, at 16, so far but no further. For the Estefans, this is life alng the parent-pop star hyphen. It has its trial and, occasionally, its rewards. The arena here does not smell like bull.
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