Out of the Dark ...

Gloria Estefan’s life was in perfect rhythm – early in 1990. The career of the Cuban-American singer and dancer was hotter than ever, her latest single "Here We Are" was a Top 10 hit – and then, on March 20, disaster struck. Estefan’s tour bus, headed north on a Pennsylvania highway bound for a concert date in Syracuse, N.Y., collided with a tractor-trailer. Lying there bleeding in the twisted wreckage, Estefan was alarmed to find she could not move her legs. Her career as a pop superstar seemed to be abruptly over.

"I was paralyzed from the middle of my back down until they operated on me," Estefan recalled 11 years after the terrible accident, which left her with lacerations that required 400 stitches. "It took several months before I was able to put my underwear on by myself – that should tell you something."

"[Doctors] didn’t think that I would ever perform again. They were quite blunt about that," Estefan remembers, "and I really didn’t care, quite honestly. At that moment I just didn’t want to be a burden. My dad was in a wheelchair for many years, so I knew what it means to family and how hard it is to have someone that lives in a chair."

Immediately after the accident, doctors placed two titanium rods in Estefan’s back and started her on physical therapy, all the while advising the performer, who was 32 at the time, that it was unlikely she should ever dace the conga again. But spurred on by her tight-knit family ("My husband [Emilio] was an angel through that whole experience and didn’t leave me for a moment") and displaying an iron will that her doctors had not factored into the equation, Estefan plunged into six hours of daily rehab and returned to the stage 19 days shy of the one-year anniversary of the accident. Within two years she was fully recovered and dancing with the same grace and strength she had displayed before the accident.

Estefan comes to the Mandalay Bay Events Center Nov. 3 for her first concert anywhere in nearly two years. Since the dawn of the millennium, the five-time Grammy winner has mostly stayed at home in Miami with her husband and their 7-year-old daughter, Emily, and 21-year-old son, Nayib. In the Eighties and Nineties, the Latin diva became renowned for making lengthy international concert tours, and her fans have been starved in recent months for an opportunity to see her again.

Estefan said in an interview with What’s On that she regrets not touring recently, but felt she had to be at home with her young daughter.

"When we do tour, it’s usually a worldwide tour, which means sometimes up to 16 months on the road," Estefan said. "It’s a hard life for me. At one point we were traveling for 10 years straight and my son loved it – he had no problem with it – but my little girl is different. You have to have some kind of home life, so I balance it."

Estefan’s own childhood was chaotic because she was born in Havana, Cuba about the time Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries wrested power from President Batista. Little Gloria Fajardo was 16 months old when her family left Cuba and moved to Miami. Gloria’s father had little choice but to flee the island because he had worked as a bodyguard for Batista.

Gloria’s father took part in the failed, U.S.-sponsored 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, was captured and spent several years in a Cuban prison. While he was away, Gloria and her mother lived in poverty in a ghetto neighborhood near the Orange Bowl stadium in Miami. After being freed, her father joined the U.S. Army and went off to the Vietnam War, returning in poor health after having been exposed to the Agent Orange defoliant sprayed in the jungle by the American military. Estefan’s wheelchair-bound father suffered from multiple sclerosis throughout the Seventies and died in 1980.

At about that same time, the Miami Sound Machine, led by Emilio Estefan had featuring Gloria as lead singer (they married in 1978), emerged as one of the most popular bands in Florida and Latin America. It would not be until 1985, however, that they recorded in English and scored a U.S. hit with "Conga," followed by "Words Get in the Way," "Rhythm Is Gonna Get You" and "Anything for You." Estefan’s solo hits include "Coming Out of the Dark," "Here We Are" and "Turn the Beat Around."

Like other Cuban-Americans, Estefan has deep empathy for the Cuban people and is hopeful that good government will come soon to the land of her birth.

"I just want them to be free because I feel bad for them because they don’t enjoy the freedoms I enjoy," said Estefan, who describes herself as an optimist in matters personal, professional and political. "I’d sure like to be able to visit and see where I was born and know some of my history, which right now I don’t."

Tellingly, Estefan can’t even bring herself to state the name of Fidel Castro when she offers a prediction as to what may lie ahead for Cuba.

"I really think that change is the only thing that’s for sure ... Hopefully, it will be peacefully. I think it will be, and it’ll just run its course when the man finally passes and they [the remaining Communists] lose their grip on the people."

Living in South Florida, where the recent spate on anthrax scares started at the Boca Raton offices of the tabloid Sun and its sister publications, Estefan has closely followed the unfolding national and local news She advises that Americans be cautions but "rein in our terror."

"I don’t like to be ruled by fear and I’ve learned that there are two things that pretty much rule this life here on earth and it’s fear and love. And you have to choose love over fear because fear is not going to get you anywhere. All it does is keep you back," declared Estefan, who has an impressive track record of overcoming fear and adversity.

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