Gloria Estefan still has the Pan Am tickets her father, José, sent her and her mother to get them out of Cuba. Gloria was two years old at the time and José – previously a security guard for the ousted president Fulgencio Batista – had been jailed when Fidel Castro took power in the 1959 revolution. Following his release, he fled to Key West in Florida, sending for his family once he’d found a job. “But then he told my mum, ‘I have to go do something and I can’t tell you what it is,’” Estefan recalls. “And then he disappeared.”
José had been recruited to fight in the Bay of Pigs, the famously doomed 1961 operation, backed by the CIA, to topple Castro. “My dad was the head of the tanks division. But the equipment [was poor] and the turret in his tank was broken. And they were abandoned by the US forces that were supposed to bring ammunition when they landed on the beach.” The invading forces, mostly made up of Cuban exiles, were overpowered and José was arrested. He spent the next two years in Cuba as a political prisoner. “My mum didn’t know what had happened until she saw it on the news,” Estefan says. “She suffered a lot in those years. [Life] was tough and music was my escape from that.”
