island

    queen

Gloria Estefan has Miami at her feet as the city revels in the ever-expanding business empire and ever-popular Latin rhythms of its unofficial mayor

Gloria Estefan’s Latin pop oozes from the open-fronted boutiques along Miami’s modish South Beach like perspiration from the bare-breasted sunbathers on the baking sand. Across town in the Cuban neighbourhood known as “Little Havana”, grizzled veterans of the Bay of Pigs invasion call her “Glorita”, or little Gloria, as they would their own child. She is so identified with Miami that fan mail addressed simply to “Gloria Estefan, USA” routinely arrives at her Moorish mansion on an island in Biscayne Bay. In this city of corrupt politicians (where the latest chief executive has just been tossed out of office for vote fraud), the Cuban-born diva is popularly acclaimed as the unofficial mayor.

Estefan has become Miami’s biggest cultural export since Don Johnson and the “cigarette” speedboats of the television cop show Miami Vice. Due to release her twelfth album next month, she has already gone multi-platinum and sold 70m million records worldwide by finding a crossover audience for her Latino-disco mix. Her husband Emilio, the former band leader who discovered her two decades ago and has won five song-writing Emmys for her music, has leveraged her success into a business empire marketing Cuban culture on the American mainland.

The pair now own a recording studio favoured by Madonna and Whitney Houston, the Crescent Moon record label, a television company that dubs Latin soap operas into other languages, an Art Deco hotel on South Beach and two restaurants serving up traditional Cuban cuisine of refried beans, marinated pork chunks and finger-licking sweet plantains. In its last survey, Forbes magazine listed Gloria Estefan at No. 31 in its list of highest paid entertainers in the world, and valued Estefan Enterprises at $200 million.

“Miami’s a very unique city,” says Estefan in the throaty working-class accent that recently provoked a Saudi to offer her $7.5 million to sing in the Arabian desert (which she declined). Basking on a terrace with a panoramic view of the Miami skyline, the slight 40-year-old mother-of-two wears a hooded hip-hop sweatshirt that makes her look like a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl running with a Latin street gang. Her narrow features and burning eyes seem to have been gifted from God especially to appear on album covers. “Truly, you have to have a type of personality to live here,” she almost growls. “The heat is never too much for me. I love the humidity. I love the steaminess of it. And the greatest sunsets in the world.”

‘Fidel can’t stick around for ever. NATURE will
          take him out ... that’s what everyone is waiting for’

If there is drama and passion and sizzle in Estefan’s sound, it is the poetry of that exotic tribe of Cuban refugees that pitched camp in this old Jewish retirement colony to await the downfall of Communism on their island 90 miles away across the gleaming aquamarine of the Caribbean. Her first big break came when the Estefans’ group recorded a Spanish-language LP in 1983 that included a catchy English number called Dr. Beat, which climbed the US charts after becoming a dance hit in Britain. But it was 1985’s international breakthrough, Conga, that really put her on the world music map.

Her latest album, Gloria!, typically combines English and Spanish lyrics into the immigrant idiom known as “Spanglish”. Sometimes, words from both languages are used in a single line; at other times, the back-up singers croon in Spanish while Estefan sings in English. The up-tempo dance beat clearly evokes the percussive rhythm of the irresistible Latin salsa.

“Had we been raised somewhere else, our music would not be what it is,” Estefan growls again. “Culturally, I am that mix. I grew up listening to old Cuban records that my mother had. Then I started listening to pop music. I really have both influences in my life very strong. The fact that we were raised in this city gave us an audience that was very understanding of our music. If we had grown up in Montana, there is no way I would have made the same kind of music because we wouldn’t have been able to go out and play it to people and really nourish what became our sound, which was then eventually exported to other places.”

Exile has its own inevitable romance, and the decadent pre-revolutionary Cuba of  the Forties and Fifties has a particular nostalgic appeal. The Estefans still keep the $26 airline ticket with which Gloria escaped the Cuban revolution when she was just two years old. It’s a round-trip fare, but she stands little chance of redeeming the Miami-Havana portion – not because Castro’s revolution will prove permanent, but because Pan American Airlines has since gone bust not once, but twice (that’s capitalism for you). Even so, the day that Castro goes, she vows to perform a celebratory concert in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución. “It has to be in our lifetime because Fidel is not the demon seed,” she says. “He can’t stick around for ever. Nature will take him out if he doesn’t take himself out before. That is what everyone is waiting for.”

Estefan can easily afford a new ticket to Cuba now. Like many an immigrant’s tale, however, her story begins in penury. Her father, José Manuel Fajardo, a bodyguard for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, installed his family in Miami after fleeing the Cuban revolution. In 1961, however, he disappeared from their two-room home in Little Havana, leaving only a short note to say that he was bound to their homeland on a top-secret mission.

Only later did the family learn that he had been captured as tank commander in the Bay of Pigs invasion, in which Cuban exiles attacked Cuba in an abortive exercise backed by the US Government. For the two years he remained missing, his family subsisted on handouts presumed to come from the CIA. Times were so hard that Gloria’s mother made do by marinating the Spam she fed her two daughters with Coca-Cola to fit it for their Cuban sweet-tooth. So many of the men in Gloria’ apartment complex languished in Castro’s jails that the women left behind nicknamed it the “Cuartelito” – the Cellblock.

Gloria now lives with her family – including her mother – in a luxurious compound on Star Island just ten minutes’ drive from where tourists mug for souvenir snapshots of Gianni Versace’s bloodstains on the pavement outside the murdered designer’s South Beach home. Cars on the causeway are stopped at a gatehouse for a security check, giving the island a reputation as a celebrity retreat. The tourist boats that cruise the bay point out the Estefans’ mansion and identify their neighbours as Julio Iglesias, Sylvester Stallone and Madonna.

     ‘As an immigrant, you are able to
appreciate life more than a normal person’

Of course her celebrity does entail a certain lifestyle. Estefan dines with Iglesias when he is in town, and Madonna brings her daughter, Lourdes, round to play with Estefan’s
three-year-old, Emily. When she does venture out, even disguised in hat and sunglasses,
Gloria is quickly mobbed by fans, and her muscle-bound bodyguard Tony has to intervene. But the private Gloria is a poster girl for traditional values. She works hard, adores her family and cherishes old friends. She fairly boasts that Emily is her first and only boyfriend (can you imagine Madonna boasting of that?) and insists that her inner circle contains nobody from the music business. The day I am at her house she is appalled to learn that her oldest child, 18-year-old Nayib, has been to the barber while on a school trip to Barcelona and had his tresses done in dreadlocks.

Just steps up the promenade from Versace’s colonial-style house on South Beach is a bustling Cuban restaurant called Larios that neatly expresses the Estefans’ commitment to their own kids. Quintin Larios once ran a dingy diner in an unfashionable section of the city where Gloria and Emilio would lunch during breaks from their recording sessions. One day, while strolling on South Beach, the couple noticed a vacant hotel and decided it would make a perfect restaurant. They bought the place and handed Larios is now crowded with Cuban-Americans hungry for their grandmother’s cooking.

Gloria despises politics and tries to restrict her political involvement to humanitarian projects. In 1992, she staged a fund-raising concert to help victims of Hurricane Andrew, which devastated Florida. More recently, she sang her Spanish-language hit Mi Tierra (My Homeland) to 15,000 “boat people” languishing at the US naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba. Her one foray into formal diplomacy was a spell as a US delegate to the United Nations, during which her main task was to upstage the Cuban ambassador with other Latin Americans. Her popularity with Latin diplomats was such that when she had finished speaking, they would shyly ask her to autograph cassettes.

Among Miami’s almost 700,000 Cuban-Americans, however, Estefan is too big a figure to avoid the hurly-burly of exile politics. Her most recent imbroglio began when she intervened on behalf of an “Anglo” woman who was dismissed from an unpaid post on the local arts board for suggesting that Miami should end its ban on Cuba-based artists performing at city-sponsored events.

Estefan saw the dismissal as a crude attempt by a local non-Hispanic politician to court the hard-line Cuban vote, and fired off a letter to The Miami Herald defending the woman’s right to speak her mind. “AS an American, I am frightened to see our most basic liberties being trampled on in the march for political gain,” she wrote. “As a Cuban-American, I am embarrassed that non-Cubans might think that we are all of a narrow mind. I cannot imagine how we could explain to the people of Cuba, who have suffered so much oppression, that the very freedoms that they so desperately desire and deserve are being annihilated in their name.”

For the Old Guard of Cuban exiles, Gloria’s intervention took her beyond the pale.
Right-wing talk-show hosts denounced her on the city’s numerous Spanish-language radio stations. One caller – whom she suspects of being an agent provocateur – announced that he was burning her CDs. The furore grew so intense that the Estefans had to go on Spanish-language television to make clear that they supported the US boycott of Castro’s Cuba, and would not attend any concerts given by musicians from the island. Gloria has since placated some of the die-hards by refusing to return to Cuba earlier this year to sing for Pope John Paul II.

Nevertheless, she has harsh words for the hard-line Old Guard. “They are dying off,” she says. “That thought process is dying off. They are in their death throes… These people came from Cuba and ensconced themselves here and dug a trench. They think that by getting on radio and really lambasting Castro that that is going to do something for the revolution. You can’t have the people who grew up here in a democracy think the same way.”

The informal headquarters of the Estefan empire is the patio restaurant at the couple’s swanky Cardozo Hotel, one of the Art Deco gems that line South Beach. Every morning Emilio Estefan passes by to check on business, and his meetings seem inevitably to stretch Latin-style into a long lunch. When I caught up with him, he was surrounded by a hubbub of twentysomething Cuban-American musicians and soap-opera stars and the Haitian proprietor of a popular local nightspot called Bash. The son of a rich Cuban-Lebanese clothing manufacturer who lost his fortune in the revolution, the entrepreneurial Emilio clearly has business in his blood. “I love to work,” he tells me over long, cool drinks. When work is done with such style, it’s a difficult point to argue.

The now-famous story is that when Emilio first met Gloria, he told her that her singing could improve 95 per cent. Then 21 and working at Bacardi rum, he spent his spare time as the keyboard and percussion player in a band called the Miami Latin Boys. One day, he was taken by a friend to hear Gloria rehearse. When he chanced into her again while performing at a wedding, he asked the shy 17-year-old on stage to sing some songs and promptly invited her to join his group. It was an invitation that paid off. Women seldom sang alongside men in Cuban bands of the day. The renamed Miami Sound Machine quickly made No. 1 in the Latin charts, and eventually went on to hit the big time internationally with Dr. Beat and Conga.After a hit parade that included Bad Boy, 1-2-3 and Don’t Wanna Lose You, Gloria’s 1996 Reach was designated the official song of the Atlanta Olympic Games. “We are immigrants,” Emilio says. “As an immigrant, you are able to appreciate life more than a normal person. You always say thank you.” Already a millionaire, he seems to aspire to be the Quincy Jones of Latin music. (The black entertainer and producer is the godfather of the couple’s youngest child.) Emilio wrote seven of the songs on Gloria’s new album and produced them all. Very occasionally, he will jump on stage during one of Gloria’s performances and return to his old position at the drums. “The people go crazy,” he smiles. Gloria clearly draws an immense strength from her husband that has enabled her to overcome a welter of setbacks. During a tour eight years ago, their bus was hit by a lorry on a snowy motorway in Pennsylvania. Emilio was thrown from him shoes by the impact; Nayib, then nine, had his collar bone broken, and Gloria shattered two vertebrae. Temporarily paralysed, Gloria was told she might never walk again, let alone have her longed-for second child. She feared the same fate as her father, who spent 14 years in a wheelchair after contracting a degenerative disease linked to Agent Orange while fighting for his adopted homeland in Vietnam.

Surgeons implanted two 8in titanium rods to support Gloria’s spine, and after months of physical rehabilitation, she was back on her feet. To conceive Emily, she had to have another operation to repair a fallopian rube damaged by the crash. Less than a year after the birth, disaster struck again. A law student named Maynard Howard Clarke crashed his jet-ski into the Estefan’s 33ft motorboat and was shredded by the propellers. Emilio dive into the water and kept the bleeding holiday-maker afloat in the shark-infested waters while Gloria summoned help, but Clarke died before he got to hospital.

‘Emilio hates the
tax side and the estate
planning, so I do that.
He likes the creative side’

Exile has given the Estefans an enviable sense of purpose as they pursue their American Dream. Although Forbes magazine estimated that Gloria had earned $47 million over a two-year period, the family business continues to expand. The Estefans have recently duplicated the success of Larios with a much larger Cuban-themed restaurant in the Latin quarter of Florida’s Disney World. Called Bongo’s Cuban Café, the 550-seat establishment serves a hefty diet of nostalgia for the good old days of sweaty tropical nights, mambo dancers and Latin Romeos. Although only open since November, the enterprise has proven such a success that they have received offers to open franchises around the world. Emilio says they will open a couple more branches, but stop there.

After meeting both Estefans, a single quotation lodges in my mind as bearing the secret of their working relationship. “Emilio and I are both very business oriented,” Gloria says. “He hates the tax side and the estate planning, so I do that. He is very interested in the creative side.” It is a telling tribute to her devotion that Gloria, the pop-music icon, occupies her time with tax preparation and estate planning while her husband pursues new business opportunities.

Gloria is now exploring new creative avenues herself – those sunny, tree-lined boulevards that lead to Hollywood. She has been taking acting classes and reading scripts, and hopes soon to land a part. “It had better be soon,” she says, “or I’ll be playing grannies.” Several years ago, she was offered the role of Evita in the film version of sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s musical. At first glance, it seemed like a dream debut, but she decided to turn it down and Madonna was cast in her stead. Both Gloria and Emilio say that she just was not ready for such exposure on the big-screen and that she is aiming for a more modest start. One cannot help wondering whether the real reason might not have been that Evita’s story of the young Latin sparrow who clawed her way to the top seemed a little close to home.

© All rights reserved by The Times Magazine 1998

zurück