Estefan is an eight-time Grammy Award winner, a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, and has been named one of the Top greatest artists of all time by both VH1 and Billboard.
She and Miami Sound Machine earned worldwide success with their single " Conga ", which became Estefan's signature song and led to Miami Sound Machine winning the 15th annual Tokyo Music Festival 's grand prix in In March , Estefan sustained a life-threatening cervical fracture of her spine when her tour bus was involved in a serious crash near Scranton, Pennsylvania.
She underwent an emergency surgical stabilization of her cervical spine and post-surgical rehabilitation that lasted almost a year, but made a full recovery. A year later, in March , Estefan launched her comeback with a worldwide tour and album, Into the Light. She is also a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Billboard has listed Estefan as the third-most successful Latina and 23rd-greatest Latin Artist of all time in the U. Estefan's mother Gloria Fajardo, nicknamed "Big Gloria", won an international contest during her childhood and received a Hollywood offer to dub Shirley Temple 's films in Spanish. As a result of the Cuban Revolution , the Fajardo family fled and settled in Miami , in , and ran one of the first Cuban restaurants in the city.
He was captured by his cousin, who was a member of Fidel Castro 's army, and imprisoned in Cuba for nearly two years. After returning from the Vietnam War in , Estefan's father became ill with multiple sclerosis , attributed to Agent Orange exposure that he suffered in Vietnam. Gloria Fajardo first had to regain her teaching credentials, then worked as a schoolteacher for the Dade County Public School system.
