Latest news with #GloriaEstefan
Daily Mail
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'Rigged' Miss Universe contest slammed as fans vow to never watch it again
Miss Universe fans have been left outraged after it was revealed that recent competition winner Lina Luaces has connections to the entertainment world. The 22-year-old, from Miami, Florida, was crowned Miss Cuba 2025 on Wednesday night, which means she will move on to represent the country in the 2025 Miss Universe pageant, which will take place in Thailand this November. However, many seemed to be skeptical of Luaces' win, as it has been revealed that she is the daughter of Univision host Lili Estefan. Luaces' uncle, Emilio Estefan, is a music producer and businessman and her aunt is famous singer Gloria Estefan. Lili, Gloria, and Emilio were born in Cuba, while Luaces grew up in Miami. Her mom is estimated to have a net worth of around $500million. The outlet described the beauty queen as coming from 'Cuban-American royalty,' and it's not exactly something that is sitting well with Miss Universe fans. Many even took to the official Miss Universe Cuba Instagram page to air their grievances, with some claiming the competition was 'rigged' due to the 'nepo baby' win. Daily Mail reached out to Miss Universe for comment. One person wrote: 'I'm sorry and nothing against her but there were better contestants. Her last name and family connections is why she won. All of these contests are rigged.' Another agreed and added: 'Honestly we know why she won the crown… like it's so obvious.' A third said: 'This will be the last Miss Universe Cuba competition I watch. If you noticed, she was called first EVERY TIME. They should just skip the dog and pony show and name a sponsored winner without the pretend competition. It would save a ton of time and money!' Another photo of Luaces posted to the account was also flooded with comments. One said: 'Nepo baby,' while someone else added, 'Mi$ Nepoti$m!!' However, other Miss Universe fans defended her, with some claiming that they felt like she represented the Cuban-American community very well. One supporter said: 'Honestly we couldn't have a better representation… she is perfection. Always was. Like this was exactly what we want to represent "us".' Someone else agreed and wrote: 'I think Lina is representative of all Cubans. She was born out of the island because her family fled horrific political and economic circumstances on the island. 'Many, many Cubans live in exile for this same reason. We were born here in the USA due to circumstances beyond our control. We are still Cuban! Congratulations Lina! You represent me and my Cuban story!' There has been no evidence so far that the Miss Cuba 2025 competition was rigged. To be able to enter as a contestant in the Miss Cuba competition, you must be born in Cuba, or of Cuban descent, like Luaces is. Per Hola! Magazine, Cuba had been out of the competition for 57 years without a representative for the country. They made a return in 2024 when Marianela Ancheta was crowned as the winner. Miss Universe is a pageant that brings together girls from all over the world, each representing different countries. Last year, the winner was Victoria Kjær Theilvig, from Denmark. President Donald Trump was the previous co-owner of Miss Universe, from 1996 to 2015.
Daily Mail
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
'Rigged' Miss Universe contest slammed as fans vow to never watch again because of Miami winner
Miss Universe fans have been left outraged after it was revealed that recent competition winner Lina Luaces has a shocking connection to the entertainment world. The 22-year-old, who hails from Miami, Florida, was crowned as Miss Cuba 2025 on Wednesday night, which means that she will move on to represent the country in the 2025 Miss Universe pageant, which will take place in Thailand this November. However, many seemed to be skeptical of Luaces' win, as it has been revealed that she is the daughter of Univision host Lili Estefan. Her uncle, Emilio Estefan, is a music producer and businessman and her aunt is famous singer Gloria Estefan. Lili, Gloria and Emilio were born in Cuba, while Luaces grew up in Miami. Her mom is estimated to have a net worth of around $500 million. The outlet described the beauty queen as coming from 'Cuban-American royalty,' and it's not exactly something that is sitting well with Miss Universe fans. Many even took to the official Miss Universe Cuba Instagram page to air their grievances, with some even claiming that it was 'rigged' due to the ' nepo baby ' win. Daily Mail reached out to Miss Universe for comment. 'I'm sorry and nothing against her but there were better contestants. Her last name and family connections is why she won. All of these contests are rigged,' one person wrote. Many seemed to be skeptical of Luaces' win, as it has been revealed that she is the daughter of Univision host Lili Estefan. Her uncle, Emilio Estefan, is a music producer and businessman and her aunt is famous singer Gloria Estefan Another agreed, 'Honestly we know why she won the crown… like it's so obvious.' 'This will be the last Miss Universe Cuba competition I watch. If you noticed, she was called first EVERY TIME. They should just skip the dog and pony show and name a sponsored winner without the pretend competition. It would save a ton of time and money!' someone else typed. Another photo of Luaces posted to the account was also flooded with comments. 'Nepo baby,' someone wrote. 'Mi$$ Nepoti$m!!' one user seconded. However, other Miss Universe fans defended her, with some claiming that they felt like she represented the Cuban-American community very well. 'Honestly we couldn't have a better representation…. she is perfection. Always was. Like this was exactly what we want to represent "us,"' one watcher wrote. Someone else seconded, 'I think Lina is representative of all Cubans. She was born out of the island because her family fled horrific political and economic circumstances on the island. Many, many Cubans live in exile for this same reason. We were born here in the USA due to circumstances beyond our control. We are still Cuban! Congratulations Lina! You represent me and my Cuban story!' Of course, there has been no evidence so far that the Miss Cuba 2025 competition was rigged. Per Hola! Magazine, Cuba had been out of the competition for 57 years without a representative for the country. They made a return in 2024 when Marianela Ancheta was crowned as the winner. Miss Universe is a pageant that brings together girls from all over the world, each representing different countries. Last year, the winner was Victoria Kjær Theilvig, from Denmark. President Donald Trump was the previous co-owner of Miss Universe, from 1996 to 2015.
Times
08-07-2025
- General
- Times
Clearing out my late father's home was a revelation
I visited my late father's house in January. I was there to 'clear it out', to pick through the detritus of his life with a vulturous eye and determine what was worth saving and what was for the dump. It was my first time back since the funeral. The house looked the same as it had when he died; the only thing missing was him. I didn't know my father very well when he was alive. I couldn't tell you his favourite song, or where he had been on holiday, or the names of his friends. I have no idea what his ambitions were, what his greatest achievement was, or what motivated him. I don't know what made him cry, what made him laugh, what made him think. The memories of my father are sparse and they are fractured. Returning to his house in January, I hoped his possessions might build a better picture of the man I once called Dad. As it turns out, there wasn't much to find: a few tea-stained mugs, some old Gloria Estefan CDs, and diplomas for courses that no longer exist. But as I rifled through my father's past, something caught my eye. It was a Spanish language textbook: España Viva. The book, published in 1987, was designed to accompany the BBC Television series of the same name. Standing on the landing in my dead father's house, I held the well-thumbed, nicotine-stained book in both hands and stared at it. I was confused. My father had never once mentioned learning Spanish. In fact, he had never shown any interest in Spain or Spanish culture — apart from Gloria Estefan, and she was born in Cuba anyway. Inside the book were dozens of paper scraps, his handwriting, nearly as illegible as mine, scrawled all over them. And then I found it. Nestled between two pages was a leaflet for a Spanish language course in Salamanca. The brochure was so old that it still asked for payment in pesetas. Beneath the words 'The best choice: Spanish in Salamanca' was an image of Plaza Mayor. I recognised the image because in 2014 I too had taken a trip to Salamanca to learn Spanish. I stayed there for a week with a family who spoke no English, and I visited the language centre every day. I had never told my father about that trip, and he had never told me about his. But by picking up that knackered old textbook, a new connection was formed between me and my father. We had both gone to the same city in Spain with the same purpose in mind. He could have gone to Madrid or I could have gone to Valencia. But we didn't; we both went to Salamanca, albeit 17 years apart. And without finding that textbook, I would never have known. • Talk? No — my male friends and I just swap Instagram Reels I took the book along with a vintage Austin Reed leather shearling jacket that happened to fit me perfectly. As I rode the Tube home, I thought about what my father had left me: a dog-eared Spanish textbook and a jacket with a pocket full of used tissues, a dental receipt and a Tanning Shop freshening wipe. It wasn't much, but it was something, and it was something physical. I held the book and jacket on my lap, and a thought occurred to me: this is what my father left me; what will I leave behind? • Tracing my roots in the household clutter See, we live in an increasingly materialistic yet immaterial world. Physical possessions have taken the back seat, their value replaced by the incorporeal world of the internet and the cloud and everything else that exists but can't be held. And while the digitalisation of our lives has given us unlimited access to information, it has also broken our connection to the real world, the tangible world, the world that we can touch, taste, see and smell. Last year, I was mugged. My phone got snatched by some kid in a balaclava. And being the slave to technology that I am, my whole life was on that phone. And being the idiot that I am, none of that life was backed up. I lost every image, every note and every video. I lost the voicemails my father had left me before he died. I lost every photo I had ever taken with my girlfriend; I lost every text I had ever sent her. All of it was gone in a matter of seconds — the online equivalent of a house fire that leaves nothing behind but soot and ash. But it's not just me whose worldly possessions have moved from the physical to the intangible. Who gets film photos developed? Who buys notebooks and writes by hand? Who sends letters instead of emails? Who bothers to pay with cash? In each of these examples, the digital alternative is more efficient. But the digital version is also devoid of character, and it says very little about who we are as people. • I grew up with an older, single mother. I can't imagine Christmas away from her As invasive as it sounds, you can get a good idea of a person by going through their things. Step inside a person's home and a whole world is elicited: the books they keep, the memorabilia on the mantelpiece, the albums stacked along the shelf, the photos on the wall, the mound of journals in the attic, the chewed-up baby blanket from their youth now hanging in the kitchen like a priceless painting. As much as we hate to admit it, our possessions define us. I'm not talking about the monetary value of these possessions. A childhood teddy under a pillow says more about a person than the Alfa Romeo parked outside. Asgard on his trip to learn Spanish in Salamanca Technology is brilliant. It has done so much for the world — most of it good. But we can't allow the physical souvenirs of our lives to disappear entirely, otherwise what will be left of us when we're gone? When I was 15 I worked as a volunteer at a nursing home. Many of the residents had advanced Alzheimer's. Walking along the corridors, I would stop and look at the display cabinets outside their rooms. These cabinets were the SparkNotes of their lives: photos, scraps of paper, letters from late partners, estranged lovers and lost children, little glass menageries from friends long gone. A resident's whole life in a square box. Sometimes a resident would enter their room and stop to observe their own display cabinet, and they would remember who they were, however fleeting that remembrance was. At the time, I found these possessions moving. Now I see them as essential. So, to answer my previous question: what will I leave behind? In the 2020 film Nowhere Special James Norton's character — a window cleaner dying of cancer — is reluctant to leave anything behind for his three-year-old son for fear it will only hurt him more. In the end, he leaves a memory box: a plastic container of letters, photos and a window wiper so his son will know what his father did. It wasn't much — nor is a Spanish textbook from 1987 — but it was something, and it was something physical. And while the world encourages us to declutter and to transfer our lives online, I will endeavour to hold on to the few precious physical items I own, even if they are of no value to anyone else — and I hope that one day I too will get the chance to leave them behind.
Daily Maverick
27-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Maverick
In a stage adaptation of the lauded novel, Kompoun becomes a ritual of liberation
Family secrets, handed-down traumas, a search for truth and storytelling as a ritual of healing, the play examines life's darkest crevices and in the process manages to engage, entertain and move. Two cousins arrive on stage in calf-length jeans and white Converses, along with plenty of attitude and Gloria Estefan's Conga Beat playing like it's the theme tune for their dance into battle. They're on a mission to perform for us, daring us to witness their enactments, compelling us to pay attention to their ritual of storytelling. They're pretty hectic, too, unapologetically so. Over the course of the performance that ensues, they prove themselves wholly worthy of our attention. They have a lot to say that cuts to the bone; there is no holding back. Adapted for the stage from Ronelda Kamfer's novel, which is something of a literary powerhouse, Kompoun is a weighty show, relentless and cutting. It examines various forms of trauma – family, childhood, generational – in an explicitly and distinctly South African context, conveyed through the observations, experiences and memories of these cousins, Nadia and Xavie (Xavie) McKinney. The show, despite the awfulness of some of the stories told, is gorgeously entertaining, very funny in places, and fuelled by a wonderful sense of aliveness that's generated by the two young actors, both bright-eyed and both gorgeous, who are determined to hold you in their grip from start to finish. Directed by Lee-Ann van Rooi, Kompoun is not only cleverly designed to play in a space encircled by the audience, but beautifully lit so that the dance of light and shadow adds to the texture of the performance. The play premiered early in May at Suidoosterfees in Cape Town and will travel to the National Arts Festival in Makhanda this month. It is hard-hitting, rough, raw. Emotionally shattering, if I'm honest. And it is gritty in the best sense of the word. It's quite something, because so much of what the audience hears conveys something of the emotional claustrophobia of being trapped in an environment – in a community, in a family – where escape from the suffering seems impossible. This play makes you feel what it must be like to be stuck in that cycle of abuse, to have distress feel so much a part of your human experience that it's hard to imagine any other way of being. And thus the cycle is perpetuated. Written in Kaaps (or Afrikaaps), which feels very close to the bone and possesses a kind of inherent poetry and musicality, the language is also incredibly visual. It is also rough. There are lines like, ' Net 'n lekker man kry 'n poes op 'n silwer skinkbord! ' (only a good man gets pussy on a silver tray), which effectively sums up both the ribald humour and the honest, if callous, kinds of observations that these two young characters are capable of sharing. Kamfer has said that she gave the novel young narrators because youth is generally that time in our lives before we begin to compromise, before life's focus turns to selfish risk-avoidance. In other words, we can rely on Nadia and Xavie to be honest and open with us; they have seen a lot and know a lot, but have not shut down the possibility of change, of escape, of hope. And they are resilient, determined to claim the freedom they crave. Nadia, who is played by the wonderful Melissa de Vries, at one point states that the play is 'an intervention', a way of breaking the multiple cycles of abuse that haunt the cousins and their family. She and Xavie, played by another lovely actor, Angelo Bergh, are the grandchildren of the stammoeder (clan mother, matriarch, ancestress) Sylvia McKinney, whose power over ensuing generations has a kind of hyperbolic, almost inescapable quality, as though there is a genetic cause for trauma, that it's something inherited by birth. But Nadia and Xavie represent a generation that is fed up and well aware that there's nothing magical or inherited about what the people in their family have had to endure. To break the curse, they have to confront the past, recognise and address its mistakes, and refuse to be part of it. It's not magic or spell-casting they're busy with, though, but storytelling, something ancient that humans have done since we first gathered around fires to collectively share our experiences. They are on stage to talk about their family's history and let slip its secrets, reveal their grandmother's lies. Letting truths out of the bag is a kind of ritual of liberation, a gear shift meant to end the status quo in order to break free from the stranglehold of abuse and end a cycle of handed-down trauma. By telling these stories, Xavie and Nadia are determined to stop the 'generational curses' that have afflicted the McKinney clan. And thus the play is a type of therapy, too – by sharing the burden of the past with the audience, Xavie and Nadia can perhaps empower us all to move forward, potentially unburdened. It is theatre as a kind of cleansing, breaking free, healing and renewal. It is sometimes very dark, often very bleak. And yet the play's magic is that, rather than pulling the audience down, it manages to stay entertaining. A considerable achievement is how Van Rooi has managed to inject lightness and upbeat energy into what could easily have been an entirely sombre affair. Sure, it is devastating from start to finish, full of heinous, horrific, no-holds-barred accounts of trauma and its myriad manifestations, but you feel the two actors holding your hand (sometimes tightly, sometimes with a hint of anger or despair, even rage) as they guide you through it. They somehow filter those harrowing, chilling experiences through a lens that makes them bearable without lessening their impact. The play has an intentionally rough-and-ready look and feel, so much so that there's an aura of improvisation to it, as if Xavie and Nadia are driven by rising impulses, or triggered to remember specific moments by the props and paraphernalia they find on the stage with them. What we get is a non-chronological account of everything from psychological torture and alcoholism, to bitterly dysfunctional relationships and violence against women and children. Among the cast of characters Xavie and Nadia bring to life, there are sociopaths like Auntie Daphne, and there is Diana, who is described as 'a party animal for all eternity', and there's a mother who has developed arthritis, 'because she's a weak-ass fuck'. Not particularly pretty pictures, but this play is not here to beat around the bush. There are women abused by men and children abused by just about everyone, and there are victims forced to apologise when they're the ones wronged or harmed or beaten. And, along with the toxic family members they dredge up, there are also a few they decide they'd prefer not to enact because they're, frankly, too far gone to resurrect, whose ghosts must rather be left alone. Those characters that are brought to life are enacted using all manner of disguises, sometimes with parody, mockery and hilarious caricatures, sometimes with hair-raising one-liners that instantly reveal their quirks, habits or dark secrets. There are aunties in dressing gowns and shower caps, and funny vignettes with unexpected props. A central image is a funeral where the large metal farm gate that Nadia and Xavie carry onto stage at the start becomes a coffin borne by pallbearers chosen according to some complicated calculation of each family member's relationship to the deceased. Later, the gate is repositioned in a variety of ways to create other images, too, including its transition into a devastating evocation of child suicide. Part of Van Rooi's approach is to create imagery that can linger in the audience's imagination. It's a way of leaning into theatre's power to make the audience in a sense a participant, part of the unfolding ritual. It's a play made for the stage, and its drama is as much in the words as it is in their delivery, and in the visceral experience of witnessing the two actors interact within the space, effectively reorganising the molecules in the room as they commune with the audience. In an interview, Kamfer has stated that her intention with the novel was to generate something beyond mere sadness; it's the characters' strength, their belief in a better version of the future and their rebelliousness that gives Kompoun its upbeat energy. Xavie and Nadia refuse to submit, refuse to give in, refuse to back down or be defeated by the past. As characters, they possess a kind of revolutionary zeal, are committed to the cause of personal liberation, of unshackling themselves psychologically, emotionally and physically from what has gone before. There's a line in the play that gave me goosebumps: 'I can't cry because part of me is glad for her,' Nadia says. It's a reference to that aforementioned image of suicide, committed by a 12-year-old child so broken by abuse, so pushed to the edge, so unable to continue, that she had sought the only means of escape she had available to her. That line echoed in my head long after the ovation at the end of the show had died down. Despite the hard, sore realities it reveals, and the wounds it deals with by unrelentingly ripping off the plaster, Kompoun really does feel like an intervention. It feels like a light shone in the darkness, and it feels precisely like the kind of theatre we need to help lift curses inherited from the past. The clue is in another line that struck me hard: 'Your father is buried and now we can breathe. Now you may live.' Amen to that. DM
Miami Herald
21-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Miami Herald
These Miami brothers took their musical act to national TV. Remember them?
Before Gloria Estefan and before KC and the Sunshine band, a family band put Miami music on the map. The Rhodes Brothers recorded albums and appeared on nationally TV variety shows. But back in Miami, they were best known for their local performances at lounges around town, their own club near the Miami airport, their restaurant at the Miami Springs Country Club and their appearances on the Jerry Lewis telethon. They came to Miami in the early 1960s, but also were known across the country. In 1969, they appeared on the 'Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.' 'They have something special, something different,' Carson said as he introduced The Fabulous Rhodes Brothers. 'They have an electricity about them that literally turns the audience on.' The brothers — Ruey, Johnny, Tommy and Eddie — were known for their smooth three-part harmony and slapstick comedy. The Fabulous Rhodes Brothers spent the early 1960s playing hotels and casinos across the country. Their big break came in 1968 at the Crossway Inn in Miami. 'One audience member really liked watching four guys sing and dance while holding banjos,' Johnny Rhodes once said. 'His name was Roger Ailes and he signed us up for the Mike Douglas Show.' Here's a look at the Rhodes Brothers through the years:
