Emilio Estefan Documents Cuban 'Exile Experience'

By Michael Lopez

If you want to know what it's like to live a life in exile, check out Cuban-American music producer Emilio Estefan's latest project. The Exile Experience: Journey to Freedom — a bilingual coffee-table book created in collaboration with The Miami Herald Co. and its subsidiary, HCP Aboard Publishing — features photos of and stories about Cuban immigrants living in exile.

“This [book] is not about me, it’s about the whole Cuban community,” Emilio told AOL Latino. “And how proud I am to be born in Cuba, to be a Cuban-American, and to tell the world how lucky we are to live in a free country.”

Emilio knows the struggle firsthand. As a teen, he fled the country with his family shortly after Fidel Castro’s rise to power. The Exile Experience documents the journey of Estefan and countless other Cuban entertainers and politicians.

“It has been an exile [community] that has fought a lot,'' Estefan told the Miami Herald. "They have had to work hard, to defend themselves against everything, to separate from their families, their properties, even their own personalities, because they have had to start all over again in a totally new country.''

The Exile Experience is available in three editions, each tailored to immigrants who left Cuba via Operation Pedro Pan, the Freedom Flights and the Mariel boatlift. More than 400,000 exiles are mentioned in the books.

Are you or any of your family members living in exile? Tell us about it in the comments or @MTV3.

Tags Books, Cuba, Cultura, Emilio Estefan, Politics, The Exile Experience