Exile, invented Cubanness and anti Castroism in Gloria Estefan: notes on the album Mi Tierra

Released in 1993, Mi Tierra is considered one of Cuban singer Gloria Estefan's most important albums. Born in Havana (Cuba), Gloria went into exile in the USA with her family shortly after the 1959 Revolution, and over the years became involved in anti-Castroism and opposition to the revolutionary government. Considered nowadays to be one of the main spokespeople of the Cuban community in exile, Gloria Estefan has always channeled her Cubanness in her songs and performances, but in the 1990s she began to emphasize this process even more so, particularly considering the context she had lived through in Cuba, and also among the exile community. It was in this context that she produced the album Mi Tierra, a collaborative effort that brought together different artists –some exiled, but many sympathetic to anti-Castroism–, whose central theme was Cuban identity projected by the exiled communities. The present work intends, in a historiographical analysis inserted in the perspectives of the history of the present time, to analyze the album, released in 1993 by Epic Records, as an album inserted into the Cuban “culture of exile”. The article seeks to understand the role of nostalgia and the way in which its composition articulated emotions and uses of the past in the production of a representation of Cuban identities in line with anti-Castro discourse.