8 Ransom Everglades LOG SPRING 2026 Lafuente was accepted and received financial aid. “Stepping on campus, standing on the bluff, in the Dell, you feel the ghosts of all those brilliant people. I fell in love with Ransom Everglades,” Lafuente said. Math teacher Alina Mendoza, now faculty emerita, was his favorite, and her son Antonio “Toto” Collazo ’07 became one of Lafuente’s best friends. She and drama teacher Kate Denson encouraged him to act in school plays. “Danny was a performer, a go-getter,” said Mendoza. She sewed costumes for the plays while Lafuente’s mother did hair and makeup. Mendoza sometimes took Lafuente home after school so he didn’t have to wait there for his mother to get off work and pick him up. “He used to watch the cheerleaders practice and he learned all the cheers. During Spirit Week for the lip-sync event, I taught them oldies and he did an amazing impression of Boy George singing ‘Karma Chameleon.’ “He was also so smart that I’d teach the lesson, he’d get it right away and then play around and disrupt the entire class. I’d tell him, ‘You may step out, or you may help your classmates.’ He was very good at tutoring.” Lafuente continued to excel in high school, playing soccer, competing in track and field, serving as class president in ninth and 12th grades, acting in such plays as The Man Who Came To Dinner and Much Ado About Nothing. “My grandad came to every play and afterward he’d say, ‘You were great, but acting is not a career,’” Lafuente said. “He wanted me to be a lawyer.” Lafuente said he always felt comfortable with his wealthier classmates even if some of his friends did not. “Danny was such a salesman he won first prize of $250 for selling the most wrapping paper,” said Lafuente’s mother, Maria. “His brother, Pablo, is more easy-going, more studious, more careful. Danny is like me. He can’t sit still. He’s a comedian. An amazing dancer. He had many girlfriends. He was a Boy Scout. He taught kids at our church. And he bakes his own bread.” Lafuente applied to Ransom Everglades Middle School on the recommendation of his brother, who by then was a student at Penn, working part-time in the admissions office. Ransom Everglades had a spectacular track record of sending graduates to the nation’s top schools. They now live within a mile of each other in Coral Gables. “It was where we discovered the world was full of possibilities.” Lafuente grew up in Allapattah near the Miami River with his older brother, Pablo. They were raised by their mother, Maria Lafuente, who worked as a cosmetologist and hair stylist in Coconut Grove. She was separated and later divorced from Danny’s father, who was mostly absent during Danny’s youth. But Lafuente got plenty of attention, affection and guidance, thanks to his maternal grandparents. Grandfather Pablo Alvarez immigrated from Cuba to Miami in 1956 and helped dozens of relatives move to South Florida. “In Cuba, my grandad sold chickens as the primary breadwinner in his family so he had to drop out of school in the fifth grade,” Lafuente said. “When he came here, he spoke no English and could barely write. That’s why education was his No. 1 priority for us.” Lafuente inherited his entrepreneurial spirit from his grandfather, who owned various businesses – auto repair, construction, demolition, a flower shop and the River Canal Marina, where Lafuente spent summers working as a cashier and selling mangoes he collected from his aunt’s yard. “I always knew I wanted to start my own business,” Lafuente said. “I wrote my first business plan when I was 8: A horror-themed ice cream shop with spooky flavors – Eye Scream. And in the back was a room where kids could have tutoring sessions.” Lafuente attended Coconut Grove Elementary across the street from his mother’s hair salon. He’d come over after school and get his cheeks squeezed by her clients. Then he’d sell them fundraising-drive products like chocolate or Christmas wrapping paper. Pablo Lafuente, Pablo Alvarez, Danny Lafuente ’05 Maria Lafuente, Danny Lafuente ’05 and Alina Mendoza at commencement 2005 Danny Lafuente ’05 in The Man Who Came to Dinner, 2004 “I asked myself, ‘Why can’t social impact and profit be tied together? There has to be a way to do good and make money.’” – Danny Lafuente ’05
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