Gloria Estefan

Estefan sang for a Miami wedding band called the Miami Latin Boys and stayed with it when it became the Miami Sound Machine. Conga broke the group internationally in 1985 and is still the song she gets introduced with, followed across the rest of the decade by Anything for You, 1-2-3, Bad Boy and Rhythm Is Gonna Get You. By the 1987 album Let It Loose the billing had become Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, and in 1989 she went out under her own name with Cuts Both Ways.

What she has done better than almost anyone in her lane is hold two audiences at once without thinning either. The English-language singles were engineered for American pop radio. Mi tierra, in 1993, was a Spanish-language album of Cuban forms recorded straight, with no crossover hedging in it at all. The awards follow that split: Grammys in the Tropical Latin album category, Latin Grammys for traditional tropical album, tropical song and short form music video, plus the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

In March 1990 her tour bus crashed near Scranton, Pennsylvania and fractured a vertebra in her neck. The account behind this page stops at the crash; the catalogue picks her up again three years later with Mi tierra, which is its own kind of answer. The acting since has been a real second track rather than a favour: dramatic supporting parts in Music of the Heart and For Love or Country, comedy as the family matriarch in Father of the Bride and One Day at a Time, and voice work in animation now aimed at the grandchildren of her first audience.