Gloria! In The Highest.

Gloria Estefan’s new album is winning awards, but she promises fans she’ll perform plenty of their favorite old hits in concert Saturday, her first here in 12 years

Wednesday - January 14, 2009
By Chad Pata
E-mail this story | Print this page | Archive | RSS |

Del.icio.us

Gloria Estefan receives rousing applause from fans in Rotterdam during her recent European concert

The two of them joined Estefan on stage at the Latin Grammys where they performed the song No Llores together.

“Performing with Santana and Feliciano was one of the most-special moments of my career,” says Estefan.

She is cherishing these moments as her career is winding down; she conducted her last U.S. tour four years ago and her last European tour at the end of last year.

“At this point in my life, I want to concentrate on other things. I want to enjoy my daughter; she is a fantastic athlete and I enjoy nothing more than going to her games and cheering her on and I want to enjoy that. I know how quickly it goes,” says Estefan, whose son Nayib is 28 and now lives in Los Angeles.

“Life goes by very quickly, and I want to be there for my daughter and enjoy things with her. So I do things very calmly. Now we are doing Hawaii, so we’ll keep doing things in little pieces so I can have balance in my life.”

Her interests have varied outside the music world. She has written two best-selling children’s books about her bulldog Noelle, and along with her husband has returned to her family’s culinary roots and owns eight restaurants and three hotels.

“I come from a long line of chefs. My great grandfather was a chef to two presidents in Cuba, and I grew up in the kitchen with my grandmother. She made a whole business out of food and catering,” recalls Estefan.

“Her dream was always to open a restaurant, but she could never find investors. So when we got the opportunity to buy these hotels and they had restaurants in the lobby ready to go, we thought, let’s bring a really good Cuban place to Miami Beach.

‘She can really play’ says Estefan of Emily

“It was kind of selfish, because I live in Miami Beach and had to drive very far to get the best Cuban food. It started as something to promote our culture. Since we already did it through music, we thought we’d do it through food. It was a natural progression for us.”

The culture of Cuba is deeply rooted in Estefan, whose father, Jose Fajardo, served as a bodyguard for dictator Fulgencio Batista before the Communist revolution. After Fidel Castro overthrew the government, the family was forced to flee to the U.S.

Once here, the CIA recruited her father to join the invasion team at the Bay of Pigs, where he was captured by his own cousins and became a political prisoner for 18 months until President Kennedy negotiated his release.

“My music was my escape from politics,” says Estefan. “When he came home he joined the U.S. Army, went to Vietnam and came home with Agent Orange poisoning. So my music has always been an escape from the reality in our lives. My family lost everything in Cuba.”

Occasionally her music does touch on political subjects, such as her song Go Away, in which she sings to Castro, “Stay away, won’t you please stay away, live your life, but live it really far away.”

She has been seen as a symbol of her people’s resistance. The Cuban government took umbrage when Estefan was tapped to sing the theme song Reach for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

The year before, she became the first pop musician to perform before the pope, but did so only on the condition she could ask the pope to pray for freedom for Cuba.

In 2000, the pope asked her to play for him again, this time in Cuba. She refused, saying she would only do so once the country was freed from Castro’s regime.

“I do make some social commentary in songs, like Oye Mi Canto (Hear My Voice), but I don’t like to include politics in my music. However, my image is very political wherever I go in the world. I get asked a lot about Cuba and Fidel Castro. I think it is inevitable that there is change there, and it is coming, slowly but surely.

“My last dream both professionally and personally is to sing in a free Cuba, so I hope to be able to do that while I am still kicking.”

For ticket information, call the Blaisdell Box Office at 591-2211.

Page 2 of 2 pages for this story < 1 2