Gloria Estefan and the Business of Getting Back Up

Gloria Estefan's story is usually told through the hits. The version she tells herself starts earlier, in a Miami household where a teenager was helping to hold a family together.

Her father, a police officer in Cuba before the revolution, moved the family to the United States and later served with the U.S. military in Vietnam. He came home ill. Talking with Norah O'Donnell for CBS News in 2017, Estefan described what that meant at home: "It was the center of our lives. My mama had to work because she realized that my dad was only gonna get more ill." From about 12 to 18, she said, she cared for her father and her younger sister.

I.The accordion player

Music came in through a side door. A friend of her brother's was putting a band together, and in walked a young man with an accordion. That was Emilio Estefan. The band became Miami Sound Machine, and the Estefans became one of the most successful creative partnerships in American music.

The early success came in Spanish. CBS Records wanted more of the Spanish-language hits, while the band wanted to reach further, so they slipped an English track onto the B-side of a single. That track was "Dr. Beat." The crossover that followed took them around the world.

II.The crash

In 1990, the band's tour bus was rear-ended by a fully loaded 18-wheeler. Estefan told CBS that the moment came just as Emilio was on the phone hearing a Miami Herald caption read aloud, saying the couple had the world in their hands. She was left paralyzed, she told CBS, and a doctor warned her he didn't think she would ever be back on stage. Then one of them added something she has never forgotten. "And then he said to me, 'I can tell you that it's up to you.'"

Less than a year after the crash, she walked onto the stage of the American Music Awards. "It's like if I climbed Mount Everest and won the, you know, Pulitzer Prize," she told CBS of that night. In 1994, she and Emilio welcomed their second child, Emily, the child doctors once warned she might never have.

For leaders, the detail worth noting isn't the comeback itself. It's that she heard the worst case and the one variable she controlled in the same breath, and she decided to work on the variable.

III.Two very different partners

The Estefans built well beyond records. They opened businesses on Ocean Drive and Lincoln Road, ran Bongos Cuban Cafe at the downtown arena for 15 years, and later planned Estefan Kitchen in downtown Miami. When Bongos moved out of the arena, Estefan Enterprises president Frank Amadeo told the Miami Herald, "We have collectively decided to transition into a development we are working on at a property in downtown Miami that the Estefans have owned for 12 years."

Running a business with a spouse is famously hard, and Estefan doesn't pretend otherwise. She told CBS she wouldn't recommend it to everyone, then explained why it works for them: "If we were both like him, we'd be dead of heart attacks. If we were both like me, we'd be sitting on the couch playing guitar still."

It's a funny line, and also a pretty exact description of a working partnership. One person pushes. The other steadies. Each one keeps the other from their own worst habits.

IV.Freedom as the throughline

Their story eventually became a Broadway musical, On Your Feet!, and in 2017 Estefan became the first Cuban American to receive the Kennedy Center Honors. Asked what that meant, she went back to the beginning. "Imagine, I mean, my father brought us here to be raised in freedom," she said, adding that it meant a great deal to her parents' generation.

Miami is full of people who arrived with very little and built something. Estefan is one of the most visible of them, and her account is refreshingly short on mythology. She took care of her family when she had to, took the creative risk when it was there, got back up when a doctor told her it was up to her, and picked a partner whose temperament balanced her own.

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Gloria Estefan