Music is a tremendously important part
of Cuban culture.
One of my picture books coming out next year
is about a 10-year-old girl who broke
the taboo against female drummers in Cuba.
Prior to the 1930s, only men played the drums,
and a 10-year-old girl was the first to break that taboo.
I have a picture book coming out next year, also,
about orangutans.
It's called Orangutanka, and it's
told entirely in tanka poems.
But my inspiration from it was a visit to Borneo,
where I was able to see wild orangutans being returned
to the wild, rescued and returned to the wild.
The palm oil plantations are replacing rainforest there,
and the orangutans do need to be rescued.
The capuchin monkey was in Panama.
He crawled onto our boat and came begging.
You just never know who you're going
to meet when you go exploring.
But because Cuba is one of the United States' closest
neighbors, even if I didn't have the personal family connection,
I would hope that there would be a chance
to treat neighbors as friends and to have normalized
relations.
I've done something very difficult
for me within the past couple of years,
and that's write a verse memoir, a childhood
memoir about my travels back and forth to Cuba
and then about losing the right to travel after the Missile
Crisis.
And those are painful memories to write.
It's also much more difficult to write a memoir
than it is to write historical fiction where you can imagine
details, and you can mix fictional and nonfictional
characters.
In a memoir, I have to tell the absolute truth and nothing but.
So I do hope that my memoir, which
goes up to age 14, my first 14 years,
and is really a case where a subtitle is valuable
because it's subtitled A Cold War Memoir--
and I hope that it could be used in Cold War teaching units
to show a personal aspect.
And I would just like to end with saying, greetings
from Cuba, your close neighbors, and hopefully, there
will eventually be a chance to be friends again.
And I'd be happy to try to answer
any questions about anything except predicting the future
of US-Cuba relations.
[LAUGHTER]