Gloria Estefan: "Voluntary CIA agent?"

By M. H. Lagarde

Google translation. Slightly revised by Walter Lippmann.

According to People magazine, if fate had not put Gloria Estefan in the music world, probably the Cuban singer would have become a spy. She was then still very young and by her ability with languages, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) United States proposed that she go to work for it.
"They realized that I was someone who could pass as a regular person without raising any eyebrow. So the CIA approached me and wanted me to train in their Atlanta headquarters," said the 52 year-old song interpreter to the Telemundo TV program Al red vivo with Maria Celeste Arraras. She explained that the offer came while working as an interpreter of Spanish, English and French Customs at Miami International Airport. The Cuban said her mother influenced her decision saying she should not consider the proposal, having already suffered a lot from her father's political activities. However, besides the knowledge of several languages, the history of her father may have been one of the reasons that the CIA proposed that she join their ranks.
Her father, Jose Fajardo, had been a bodyguard for the dictator Fulgencio Batista and was imprisoned in Cuba after being captured during the mercenary invasion of Bay at the Pigs in 1961. Fajardo, then fled to Florida, where he was granted citizenship and later joined the U.S. Army to fight in Vietnam.
However, the famous singer of the eighties, admits it had been an attractive offer. "Maybe I made the decision [to do], he said, What better cover to go as a singer, talking to the chairs, talking to the Kings, close to all the people who wanted access? So, who knows ?
The truth is that agent or not, at least in regard to its retrograde position on Cuba, such a father-of ...- both the singer and her husband, music impresario Emilio Estefan, have done a great service to the Agency.

ORIGINAL PEOPLE MAGAZINE STORY:
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20262951,00.html