FROM A CUBAN HEART

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

When one-year-old Gloria Maria Fajardo and her family left Cuba for America, Cuba never really left them. Gloria's father, Jose Manuel, had been a motorcycle escort for the wife of Cuban ruler Fulgencio Batista, so when the President was overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1958, the Fajardo family fled Havana on a $21 round-trip flight. But once in the U.S., Jose Manuel became restless, itinerant, dreaming of Cuba. He participated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and was thrown into a Cuban prison. Released after two years, he later went to Vietnam with the U.S. Army, was exposed to Agent Orange, developed multiple sclerosis and died in 1980. Gloria used to send her father tapes of her singing when he was away. He once sent back a tape with a message: "One day you're going to be a great star."

Many fathers have such wishes for their little girls, but Jose Manuel's came true. Little Gloria grew up to become Gloria Estefan, the popular singing star, with 45 million albums sold worldwide. Her latest recording, Destiny, is climbing the Billboard charts, and its featured single, Reach, has been designated as the official theme song of the Atlanta Olympics (she will perform it during the closing ceremonies). But singing star or no, Estefan, a 38-year-old mother of two, still has the unused portion of her round-trip ticket from Havana to Miami. Even as she chats, relaxed, in the two-story mansion she shares with her manager-husband Emilio on Star Island off the Miami coast, she thinks of Cuba, "mi tierra." She says mournfully: "I can't even see where I was born."

There are two ways an immigrant can assimilate into American life. One approach is to embrace mainstream culture, the sitcoms, the Coca-Cola, the straight-ahead pop music and, of course, the English language. The other way is to assert your own identity, your own heritage, and compel the rest of America to taste your spices, to dance to your Afro-Cuban grooves. Estefan has done both. From the mid-1980s on, her work with the Miami Sound Machine consisted mostly of processed American-style dance music seasoned with punchy Latin rhythms. "She was the first to take Latin-influenced music, the heavy percussion sounds, mainstream," says Jon Secada, a singer-songwriter who has worked with Estefan and gone on to solo success of his own. "Because of her, Latin music began to get a lot more respect."

Tragedy struck in 1990. A semitrailer slammed into the tour bus Estefan was traveling in, breaking her back. She narrowly escaped paralysis (doctors inserted two 8-inch-long steel rods into her spine), but recovery was arduous. Still, less than a year after the accident, Estefan was back onstage--singing and dancing. Says Jorge Casas, Estefan's longtime bass player and musical director: "That alone should give you an idea of how incredibly driven and hardworking she is."

But something had changed. Estefan's music became more reflective. She returned to her roots, singing the Spanish-language songs her grandmother sang to her when she was a child. Her album Mi Tierra (1993) was entirely in Spanish and drew from the traditional music of Cuba; a follow-up, Abriendo Puertas (1995), also in Spanish, incorporated the music of Colombia and Venezuela. Estefan was a crossover star who was able to cross back. "A lot of people told me at the beginning, 'You're too Latin for the Americans, too American for the Latins,'" she says. "And I say, 'But that's who I am.' I'm Cuban American; I'm not one thing or the other. I have an American head and a Cuban heart."

Destiny is a product of her bicultural soul. The title song features the gentle sound of a classical guitar, accompanied by harp, viola and cello. Reach, the Olympic anthem on the album, contains moments of mature reflection between the big sing-along, go-for-the-gold choruses. (Estefan says she and writing partner Diane Warren composed the song in 15 minutes.) Destiny is not a perfect album, but it draws smartly from Estefan's sleek Latin-music heritage while mostly avoiding the excesses of her earlier American dance-pop. Says Estefan: "I feel Destiny is a synthesis of everything that we've done in the past five years."

The singer has no shortage of projects and offers these days (her husband says she turned down the title role in the movie Evita that eventually went to Madonna), and is currently preparing for a world tour that kicks off July 18. "I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago," says Estefan. "After Mi Tierra I could never go back to doing the same old thing." Clearly, Estefan's Destiny lies elsewhere.

--Reported by Tammerlin Drummond and Aixa M. Pascual/Miami

With reporting by TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND AND AIXA M. PASCUAL/MIAMI