NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas - American Dreaming with José Díaz-Balart: Gloria Estefan

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

Grammy award-winner and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Gloria Estefan was first seen as “too American for Latins” and “too Latin for Americans”. Estefan talks with José Díaz-Balart about how she pushed to showcase her Cuban roots, revolutionizing the music industry on her way to achieving her own American Dream.

What does the American dream mean to you? It's everything. If you're willing to work hard and, you know, bust your butt and do what needs to be done, you can reach your goals and your dreams. What a pleasure to be with my friend, Gloria Estefan. Gloria, how are you? I'm great and very happy to be with you, my friend, and very proud of everything you do and thrilled to be a part of this. 100 million albums sold, 38 number one hits on the billboard, seven

Grammys, Presidential Medal of Freedom for you and for your husband, Emilio. That's an extraordinary career. Gloria, how did you get here? You know what? I asked myself the same question. I don't usually look back on all these accomplishments or things that have happened, milestones, beautiful things that we've been able to live. But sometimes when you're waiting to speak somewhere and they put the retrospective and I go, wow, we've worked a lot and we've really been so fortunate. And you never do it for those reasons. I mean, we did music because I love it.

I sing since I talk. But it really is so special to receive something like the Presidential Medal of Freedom with my husband. It was the first time it ever happened with a couple, as was the Gershon Awards, the first time a Hispanic and a couple gets it together. We've had such amazing milestones and such a wonderful career. And I thank always the incredible fans worldwide that have given us that privilege and that blessing.

We don't take it lightly. and it's gone by very fast. You know just thinking of in 1975 when essentially you you know and Emilio were playing quince and fiestas de aqui y bodas and weddings and you were so so young and yet you knew that this was your passion, your calling, your commitment. I was 17 when I joined the band and I joined it for fun because I was studying at the University of Miami. I was doing a double major communications and psychology with a French minor. And when I started in the band, I already had two other jobs. I was working at a college work study job at the immigration and customs at the airport as an interpreter for English, Spanish, and French.

And I was teaching community school guitar at West Miami Junior High two nights a week from 930 to 1130. So my schedule was packed. I was about to start school full load from 8 in the morning to noon. And Emilio asked me to join the band. So I had to really have loved it a lot. And my mother, who I had to stand up to because she was not happy when I got invited to join this band after a mutual wedding that she dragged me to. And Emilio's band was playing in. And I sat in with the band for a couple of songs. And that night he asked me to join.

I said, no, but two weeks later, he tracked me down. So she was not a happy camper. And I joined the band for fun, for excitement, because I had been taking care of my dad at home because he had been very ill, Agent Orange poisoning, diagnosed him with MS. And it was, he had already had to be hospitalized. We couldn't take care of him. So this was the first time in my life that I actually was able to do things

other than take care of my dad. So to join that band to me was like an explosion of happiness and thrilling. Even the rehearsals were my favorite, my happy place, putting music together with a whole band and musicians. And who would have thought that it would have turned into that? It wasn't until a year later that Emilio and I started dating. And we dated for two years before we got married. And it took five years to get a recording contract.

So five years of real, you know, on the ground work in South Florida. Yeah. Funny enough, that was our first big contract. But we had a recording contract with a very small local label called Audio Latino. And we put out our first album in 1976, which was Renacer Live Again. It was half in English, half in Spanish. Way too soon. But that was always our thought that we wanted to be a bilingual band. We did the second album again.

And then when we realized that this, this company didn't pay us one cent, wasn't doing anything, we extricated ourselves from that contract. It took forever. And then did a third album on our own and got that on the radio, got a couple of songs from there to be a hit. And then that's when Sony Discos came looking for us and signed us to their international label. And it wasn't until years later that then Epic Records tried to sign us when we did Dr. Beat and it became a huge hit in Europe.

And I said, we're signed to you on your international label already. So it was like everywhere we came in through the back door, it was really crazy, but fun every step of the way and exciting. You were going through the back door everywhere until 1985. When Conga explodes around the world. Come on, shake your body, baby, do that Conga. No, you can't control yourself. It did indeed.

It exploded. And by the way, everybody told us that it would never work. The record company did not want us to release that as a single and didn't. Why didn't they want to release Conga? They thought it was too ethnic. They thought we were too American for the Latins, too Latin for the Americans. They told us we needed to get rid of the horns and the percussion, that that wasn't what's happening on radio and nobody was going to

play it. And we said, but this is who we are. And the fact that it is different. We want to be us. We don't want to be another rock band. That's not who we are. And then again, we started mobilizing our forces. And one of the guys that was a small promoter, local promoter, he called one of his friends in the Midwest in St. Louis. And he said, please do this as a favor for me. Just play the song once. And the guy did it for him. Phones went crazy. They couldn't like like, it knocked down the switchboard. So then it grew like that, and it took a full year

for Conga to get top 10, because everybody thought, nobody will play it, nobody will play it. It's too extreme. It's too Latin. In so many ways, you're a pioneer in that. I can imagine time after time after time, and obviously when you became more and more successful, less. But time after time, you must have heard, this is just not really American.

Exactly. Exactly. And I knew that that's what was going to make us stand out because it was in English. I could speak perfect English. I was raised in the United States. I went to school here, you know, from the, you know, time I started in first grade in Texas that I started without being able to speak English. And within six months, I won the reading award of the class, which they were upset because I was

the only Latina. And my teacher, Dorothy Collins, was the African-American, the first African-American teacher that was in desegregation, that they put her in my school. So she was super supportive of me and told everybody that I had earned that, you know, that ability. But yeah, it was, you know, it was like pulling teeth. And the advertisers also that kind of controlled radio didn't think that there was a market for our sound so and okay so then imagine later when we wanted to do the mi tierra album that we're at the peak of fame worldwide after that was 1993 yes a bunch of hit albums and we tell them that we wanted to do an all Spanish roots Cuban record. Thankfully Tommy Mottola is a music guy and he was totally behind us because I knew I wanted people to know where the Latin side of us came from and it was

it exploded worldwide that album it was a huge success one of our biggest albums. Grammy winning album album yes our first grammy why did you decide that that was something you needed to do when it was risky because as you said you were global edition par excellence well exactly for that reason it was a moment in our career that i knew that people would be interested because of the fame that we had achieved in English. And this music was the first music that I sang for my grandmother. I knew songs from like the 20s, the 30s, the 40s in Cuba that I would learn and play on my guitar. And I absolutely loved it. And so did Emilio. When I joined the band, his band played classic Cuban dance tunes. So it was in both our DNA to be able to do

this. Now, it was a very conceptual album because what we did is we used all the instrumentation that would have been used in Cuba, BC before Castro, before they got shut down and censored. If you weren't with the government, you couldn't make no more music in Cuba after Castro came in. So we wanted to create... By the way, that's still the same today, 2020. Exactly. So we wanted to create new songs that sounded like they had been written in the Cuba of the 40s. And we used the instrumentation, the arrangements.

Juanito Marquez, one of our musicians, made sure we used everything acoustic. We had, like you said, we brought in the greats of Cuban music, legit musicians that were going to take this to a whole other level and included people like Néstor Torres from Nicaragua, Sheila E. Tito Puente. Yes, Tito Puente. Yes, Tito Puente. Everybody that was somebody in Cuban music that we had access to, we invited to be a part of this celebration of what made Cuban music great,

which was these incredible arrangements and the sounds that was nostalgic and at the same time brand new music. And Emilio's idea to write the song Mi Tierra, he wanted to celebrate the homeland, everything that every immigrant misses, the smells, the sounds, the taste of your homeland. And that's what became, and Con Los Años Que Me Quedan was the first song

that Emilio and I wrote together as a couple. Everything in that album was so personal and we were so careful. It took five years to make that album. I want to take it as the 20th of March of 1990. We were in a tour bus accident. I was actually making up dates and Freak Snowstorm and the Poconos. And we were heading to Syracuse, and we got rear-ended by a fully loaded 18-wheeler.

We had stopped because there was an accident ahead of us. That truck pushed us into another truck in front of us, which sliced the front of the bus, and I was sleeping on the couch in the front. I must have, I went backwards over the edge of the dining room table that was there in the front of the bus. And two vertebraes in my back were pushed in and exploded. I was on the floor of the bus.

And when I went to try to get up, I couldn't. The pain was excruciating, which actually gave me hope. Because having known so much about my dad's situation, I knew that had I severed my cord I wouldn't be feeling anything so for the two hours it took for the paramedics to get there and once we saw that my son Emilio found him and I just sat there and said okay as long as he's okay I don't care what happens to me and it took two hours to for the paramedics to get there I was paralyzed it wasn't until like six months after the accident that I was, I saw my body coming back enough that I thought, you know what?

Maybe this is the reason that this has happened. Maybe I can be inspiration to other people that are going through a tough moment to know that it all depends on how you deal with the difficulties in your life. And I was rehabbing six, seven hours a day once I could. I kind of want to take you back to how I know you from the distance is I think it was probably 1995. I don't know if you were having a birthday party or something, it was at the Cardoso Hotel

and it was a small, small party. I remember looking around and maybe it was 100 people. Everybody but a few people was your family members. Yes. And, you know, you have, you know, 100 million albums, countless awards. And yet your real important center is your family. Always. I am my father's daughter.

I am my mother's daughter, my grandmother's granddaughter, because she was all about family and not just her blood family, but her Cuban family. When people were coming from Cuba, I had nowhere to stay. She would put them up in her house, however long they needed to get on their feet. She created a whole business, catering business to be able to buy her own home and help people. She helped my mom. She helped my dad. She took care of my dad when he came back from Vietnam ill. And it was always about family. And to me, the toughest thing about my career was that it took me away from family. And it took me away from my pets and my animals. And I was gone sometimes for two years at a time. So whenever I was in Miami, it was all about the family.

And the first tour we went on, the only way we were able to do it is because Emilio's mother came with us to watch my son. I wasn't going to bring a stranger. And she left Emilio's dad back home in order to help us. And whenever we had, you know, parties, she was the most supportive. And Emilio's parents lived with us from the day we got married. So they were like my family. It's always been about family. And maybe because of everything I went through with my dad and the fact that I didn't get to enjoy a lot of family growing up,

it became, Emilio's family became my family. When Lily came from Cuba, my extended family. And it just makes me happy. I want to celebrate them and celebrate with them every chance I get. And it's always going to be about family for us. It is. And the exile experience,

you know, everybody who comes to this country looking for a better life has a lot of shared experiences in that process. But those who are exiled have a different perspective, I think. Very much. They gave everything up looking for freedom, looking for a place where they could raise their families in the way that they felt needed to happen in freedom. And, you know, when I think back now, and I talk a lot to my sister about it and to Emilio, and I go, can you imagine right now, because we're of the age that a lot of our parents had to leave after having established lives and businesses and success in their country.

And I say, can you imagine if right now we had to go somewhere to a country that wasn't our first language, where we're starting from zero, where we were allowed to only bring one suitcase and everything was left behind? How? I mean, it's a daunting thought. Yet somehow we grew up around these amazing human beings that sacrificed everything for us, for Emilio and me and my sister to grow up in a free country. And they gave up everything they had worked for, maybe hoping that one day they would be able to go back. But as time kept going on, they knew that that was an impossibility and making a new life in a new place and having success again there. It's really incredible what our parents did and

what the other generations and not just the Cubans, but America is built on that tradition from European immigrants that left their homeland looking for a better life and looking for a better situation for their kids and have created this amazing melting pot and quilt tapestry of so many different cultures and religions and backgrounds. And it's, that's what makes this country incredible, really, that it opened its arms to people from all over the world and created a new success story together, everybody. And I will always love and respect that in this country.

And, you know, the fact that your father left his country behind, as you say, where he had an established life and a history and roots and tierra, and decides to go fight in the United States Armed Forces. Did that shape you? Absolutely. I'm an Army brat all the way. And, you know, every two years we were uprooted and had to find a new friends, family situation until then ultimately he went to Vietnam.

And when he came back, he was ill, so he couldn't rejoin the Army, although he wanted to very badly. You know, he gave up everything. He went to Bay of Pigs. He spent two years as a political prisoner there. And then when they came here, their secret wish, the Cubans that joined the U.S. Army, was to be able to go back to Cuba from within the ranks in a better organized initiative because the timing was all wrong on Bay of Pigs. They were trained in the top of the line American tanks and equipment and what actually got sent to them to go to Cuba were broken down tanks. I know that my dad,

his captain was killed and he had the dead body in the tank for three days before he could get out because the turret was damaged and it wouldn't move. And, you know, these kinds of stories were very, very horrible. And a lot of the men lost their lives, but they didn't lose their will to try to fight for the freedom in Cuba. Again, it wasn't to be, you know, because of everything that happened, the Vietnam War, and it just wasn't to be. But that was their hope. What does the American dream mean to you? It's everything.

It's what has given me the opportunity to come to a new country because I was born in Cuba. I was two. I mean, I had no choice in the matter of coming here, but it gave me every opportunity that I was willing to take on. It's not that it's handed to you. It's never handed to anybody, but it gave me the opportunity to go to school and get a career and learn because I had a, you know, the, the singing was actually secondary to my plan. I, I, I got a degree. I was, I had been accepted to the clinical psychology school.

I had been accepted to the Soborn in Paris. And at that point was going to go and study international law and diplomacy. And then the band kind of sidetracked me. I fell in love and everything changed. And I think I made the right choice. I think so too. Yeah, but it gave me every opportunity. You know, in this country, they don't tell you,

no, you're not from this class. You cannot do this or you cannot do that. If you're willing to work hard and, you know, bust your butt and do what needs to be done, you can reach your goals and your dreams. You're helped along the way. And the spirit of this country, you know, that is passed on to every person that hopes for a better life by coming here. We're an example. It's a beacon to the world. And it has been in my life. And I love and respect this country.

And I'm in pain when it's hurting. And I suffer when it's less than it could be. Do you feel you've achieved your American dream? Absolutely. Beyond. I have gone beyond any possible dream that I could have dreamed up for myself because I'm a very content person. I would have been happy being a psychologist or being a diplomat or being a mother or a housewife. Still, I would have had dreams to continue because

education to me is key and I never would have stopped that. I still kind of toy with the idea of going back and getting a master's and a PhD just because I want to. But I have achieved far more than I ever could have dreamed for myself, honestly. And it's been a blessing and to do it beside the man I love and to still be with him, Y ha sido una bendición Y hacer esto Ante el hombre que amo Y todavía estar con él Marido 42 años Juntos 45 Es más que lo que Podría haber soñado Y tener dos hijos saludables

Y un maravilloso abuelo No puedo pedir más Gloria Con los años que nos quedan Con los años que te quedan ¿Qué quieres definitivamente hacer? In the years that are left, as to quote one of your most beautiful songs, what is still something you need to achieve? I don't need to achieve anything.

I want to be of service. Even with this new show that we're doing, Red Table Talk, what we hope is to connect and to offer people help, communication, ways to help them talk to their families. Through my music, to continue to entertain and inspire and just help people have fun. Just be more of service, you know, help out do things that are interesting to me on a, you know, on a career level and just continue to,

to try to be a positive force in the world and to try to each day help out someone in some way. What is it that you'd like to be able to be remembered for other than 100 million albums, Emmys, Presidential Medal of Freedom, you know, Grammys, Oscar, whatever it is in the future you could want. What is it that you would be happy to be remembered about? Well, you know what? I kind of wrote it in a song,

and the title is Remember Me With Love. If I can put a smile on people's faces when they think of me and have that feeling that they get be a good one, a positive one, a happy one, you can't hope for better. Because, you know, history moves on and people will forget. and all those achievements are

great you might end up in some book or you know or some statistic if people are studying history or whatever but the people that that you've moved them some way that love you first indoctrinate their kids because my fans indoctrinate their kids and it's like a circle and I'm in the fourth grade books uh so kids learn about me in the public school system in the fourth grade and I still get letters from kids now that have no idea who I was that have to google me and probably and look and see what I have done. Saying that I inspired them either through my Noel children's book or through the story that they read in their reader that I was able to get back on my feet after that accident. Those are the things that really are of value to me that

when people remember me that it's with a good feeling and a smile. You know, I oftentimes think of, oh man, I wish my dad could see me now, or I wish my dad, I could ask him, talk to him, pedirle consejos, ask him for advice. What do you wish your dad had been here for? The Presidential Medal of Freedom. I remember that day. And my mom was watching on TV. But I know that for my dad, that would have been an incredibly moving and impactful thing that his daughter, that he sacrificed his entire life for

to raise in freedom, was getting the Medal of Freedom. That would have been the best. Gloria, thank you. Thank you. It's great to talk to you. Give my love to your family, which we love, and thank you so much.

And love to you and yours, Gloria. Thank you, the same.