Gloria Estefan
discovers the power
of faith and love

Tragedy and Triumph

When a semitrailer slammed into Estefan’s tour bus on a snowy day in Pennsylvania during her 1990 Cuts Both Ways tour and fractured her spine, doctors told her that although there was a good chance she would walk again, there was only a slim possibility that she’d be able to pull off high-energy concert performances as she had before.

She proved them wrong, but it took nearly a year of intense mental and physical rehabilitation. "Because I had studied psychology. I understand the stages," she explains. "You have to go through the depression, the crying. Then, at a certain point , I pulled myself up and said, ‘Okay, no more. You can’t continue this way.’ I wasn’t going to end up in a wheelchair. I had seen my father confined to a wheelchair; I saw his helplessness and I didn’t want that for myself or my family."

Estefan’s father had had multiple sclerosis, and as a young girl with a working mother, Gloria had the responsibility of caring for him. "I was alone a lot of the time, and it was very hard. At that age, you don’t know that things will change, that it won’t always be like that," she recalls.

Frightening foresight

Chillingly, Estefan had been harboring a conscious fear of injury long before her accident. The prescience led her to have an elevator installed in the home she shares with her husband, Emilio, when they moved in several years earlier. "In the back of my mind, I thought, ‘One day I’m going to need this,’" she says of the elevator. "I’d be taking the stairs two at a time and suddenly think, ‘Someday I’m not going to be able to do this,’ The right behind the thought, another would come—that everything would be all right. When the accident happened, my first thought was, ‘This is it.’ But I chose to cling to the other thought: I was going to be all right."

Estefan believes that her recovery was hastened by the love and support of her family (her mother and younger sister love nearby in Miami) and the prayers of thousands of people, prayers that she says she could feel like a physical presence. She spent five to six hours in physical therapy every day for a year, working with spinal cord experts Carmen Klepper and Robin Smith. Her eyes darken a littler as she recalls not being able to do anything without her husband’s help. "I couldn’t even brush my teeth by myself. I couldn’t stand up."

When was the first moment she realized she would recover? She laughs. "The day I put on my underwear without help. Boy, that was something to celebrate! Then it was small goals each day: walking to the front door, to the gate. Of course, I had to be careful of the paparazzi, who were trying to get pictures of me in that condition."

Estefan, who says she’s been a health and fitness buff all her life, is now even more dedicated to keeping her body strong. In fact, it may have been her physical fitness that saved her from paralysis; doctors told her it was because if the well-developed muscles in her back that her spinal cord was not severed completely. She now has two titanium rods permanently implanted in her spine to stabilize it. Estefan works out in her home gym, which is equipped with Cybex machines and free weights, five days a week. She also works with Tony Roma, her personal trainer of two years who, like her, believed in the importance of the mind-body-connection.

"I have to work my abs a lot to keep them strong to support my back," she says. "I can’t run anymore because of my injury, so I do cardio on the machines, or I go down to the beach and power-walk on the packed sand."

Her diet is a well-balanced one. She gets most of her protein from chicken and fish rather than red meat and adds that she doesn’t believe in dieting. "If I really want a dessert, I’ll have it," Estefan says. "The I know I have to watch myself the next day, maybe work out a little harder, but I don’t deprive myself."

All in the Family

Estefan mentions the downside of fame—the intrusion of the press—with the same evenness she seems to bring to everything, including parenting. She has a 17-year-old son, Nayib, and a 3-year-old daughter, Emily. She is award of the pressures on children of celebrities, the spotlight they are born into. "It’s not fair, but it’s the way it is," she says. "You can’t turn off fame when you don’t want it. I talk to Nayib a lot about the fact that whatever he does will be noticed more because of me. I wish I could change that for him, but I can’t." She smiles and adds, "Of course, Nayib happens to love the limelight. My daughter is more like me. She’s shy—she tries to hide from people looking at her."

Nayib is tall and friendly. He has a ska-funk-punk-reggae band called Funk Munky that practices in the family garage. He and his mother talk about equipment and music; they have an easy fluidity and they communicate like friends. "Nayib and I talk about everything," she explains. "His friends are shocked sometimes." Emily has Gloria’s features, including her wide, dark eyes. She hides her face in her mother’s neck but playfully peeks out and makes funny faces.

Emilio was Estefan’s first and only boyfriend. They met at a wedding when she was 17 and he was 21 and married three years later. "It doesn’t feel as though we’ve been together 23 years," she says, "maybe because our lives have moved so quickly. We have a very passionate relationship, but we also work hard at it. We complement each other in many ways. I was very independent when I met Emilio. A relationship wasn’t what I was looking for, but I guess it was meant to be."

Estefan is a woman of strong beliefs, one of which is that thoughts create reality. Having had one of her fears materialize, she is careful about what she allow to linger in her mind. When fears arise, she moves beyond them, she says, choosing instead to embrace more positive thoughts.

"I love motherhood, and I especially love it at this stage of my life. When I gave birth to Emily, I was 37 and recovered from my accident. I was so much more settled and centered. I appreciated the miracle of her more than I could have when I was younger. I had Nayib when I was23, and even though I was mature for my age, the level of enjoyment now it different. I’m able to experience motherhood in a more peaceful way."

Priorities in Place

She also gets great joy from her work. From her early days singing at weddings with Emilio’s band, the Miami Sound Machine, in the mid-1970s, Estefan launched herself onto the pop scene with the rhythm-infused hit "Conga" and has since garnered six gold top 10 singles and nine platinum albums. With several other top 10 singles, including the balled "Coming Out of the Dark" and the dance hit "Turn the Beat Around," the two-time Grammy-winner singer is the most successful crossover performer in Latin music history. Her stage performances are electric and her music, whether ballads or upbeat songs, is always passionate and inspired. Her soon-to-be-released 19th album, Gloria!, is "very high-energy, very up, still heavy Latin fusion," she says. "Usually I mix in some ballads, but this time I did only up-tempo songs."

In addition to continuing her musical journey (she recently signed a minimum six-album deal with Sony), Estefan is also turning into the direction of acting, but with a sense of balance. Although she was pursued for the starring role in Evita, she turned it down. "I don’t want to start by taking on a major role," she says, "I don’t want to have to carry a film. I want to start small. I’m doing this for enjoyment, for creative fulfillment, to branch out. I have never done anything with the goal of stardom in mind. Stardom is just a by-product of doing the music I love."

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