LONDON, England, Tuesday October 29, 2013 – Cuban-born Gloria Estefan is the embodiment of show business success. She has sold 100 million records, bagged seven Grammy awards and has performed for six presidents.
Together with Emilio, her husband of 35 years, whom she met on joining his band Miami Sound Machine in 1976, she runs two hotels and seven Cuban-themed restaurants in the US. That’s not to mention a publishing company and recording studio, as well as a stake in the Miami Dolphins, with the grand total reportedly worth over £300million.
On Monday, her 27th album The Standards was released, featuring classics from the Great American Songbook, while the Queen of Latin Pop is currently in talks to develop a Broadway musical of her rags to riches life story.
She recently fulfilled a long-held dream to perform at the Royal Albert Hall in London, yet despite her formidable list of achievements, Estefan says one dream still remains.
“My dream is to sing in a free Cuba,” she told Britain’s Daily Mail. “I just hope I’ll be young enough to do it. The Castros have lasted a long time, but they’re pretty long in the tooth now so it’s just a matter of time.
“Despite being 87, Fidel is still very much a figurehead there. Fidel dying will help his brother Raúl to move on, but to be honest I don’t think the Castros will be able to continue after that. The Cuban people will have had enough. They’re getting braver.”
At present, any notion of performing back home in Cuba, where she is known as a terrorist and paid-up member of the mafia, is no more than wishful thinking.
Her repertoire of hit songs is still blacklisted on Cuban national radio and she daren’t return to the communist country after a lifetime spent speaking out against the Castro regime.
“The Estefans are definitely persona non grata in Cuba,” the singer was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. “They refer to me and Emilio as the Cuban mafia and say we are terrorists. It’s ridiculous.”
The singer’s parents fled to Florida when she was just two-and-a-half-years old after Fulgencio Batista was ousted by Fidel Castro in 1959.
Since then, Estefan has been back to Cuba once in 1979 when then US president Jimmy Carter temporarily lifted the ban on American travel to the island. She and Emilio went to help his brother and two children who had reportedly been victimised for announcing their plan to leave.
The singer was asked to return to Cuba in 1997 by Pope John Paul II, but refused.
“I asked him to understand that with my presence it would turn his very beautiful spiritual mission into a political one,” she said. “I could not have just sat there quietly and been a good girl. I would have needed to express my discontent at Fidel.”
Estefan, now a 56-year-old grandmother, insists she would never return permanently to Cuba having made a home of Miami, alongside the majority of the nearly one million Cuban exiles living in the US.
“I consider myself Cuban-American, because my generation were raised with a very deep love of the Cuba that was, or Cuba BC (before Castro), as I call it,” she said.
“My parents kept every bit of our culture alive because they really thought we’d be going back in a matter of months. That was 55 years ago.
“Now, the Cuba my mother remembers no longer exists, but what hurts me the most is that the Cubans are just 90 miles away from one of the richest countries in the world yet still trying to survive on a daily basis.”
Read more: http://www.caribbean360.com/index.php/news/1079331.html#ixzz2jAYEpJ9t
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