'How it happened in Cuba': Pop superstar Gloria Estefan now carries her passport 'just in case'
Gloria Estefan at the 2025 Vanity Fair Awards at La Borda del Mentidero in Madrid, Spain on October 7, 2025 (Oscar Gonzalez Fuentes/Shutterstock.com)
Although Gloria Estefan was born in Havana, Cuba, the 68-year-old pop star has lived in the United States since she was two and is a longtime U.S. citizen. Estefan, whose family moved to Florida to escape from Fidel Castro's communist dictatorship, is fluent in Spanish but has performed primarily in English over the years.
But during a late October interview with the Times of London, Estefan revealed that she now carries her U.S. passport as a form of identification because of President Donald Trump's anti-immigration crackdown.
"I have lived in the U.S. for 66 years — never have I seen freedoms being eroded in the way they are now," Estefan told the Times. "We need to stay very firm and protect those freedoms…. I know people who are in the country legally and have been taken away. One was the girlfriend of our guitar technician. She had been in the U.S. for 25 years, came in with a visa, paid taxes. In her last appointment at immigration, she got carried away and has been at a detention center for five months. Why?"
The former Miami Sound Machine singer continued, "It's inhumane, it's scary and not necessary. We don't have much power other than letting people know that that’s not what the U.S. stands for. I am not Republican or Democrat."
Estefan, born in 1957, rose to prominence in pop music during the 1980s as lead singer for the Miami Sound Machine — whose major hits included "Conga," "Bad Boy," "1-2-3," "Rhythm Is Gonna Get You," among many others. The singer became a full-time solo artist after the group broke up.
During the Times interview, Estefan drew a parallel between Trump's second administration and the crackdown on civil liberties in Castro's Cuba during the 1960s.
Estefan told the Times, "I carry my passport card around just in case, because who knows what can happen. I was born in Cuba — that's why we're so wary of what's happening, because this is the way things happened there. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that you can be stopped and questioned if you're speaking Spanish or you have darker skin…. It's tough. When we're out with the family, it's very natural to speak Spanish. It's weird that, all of a sudden, you'd have to fear that."
Read the Times of London's full interview with Gloria Estefan at this link.
