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I have not been to Cuba, though if you count the stories my grandma told me growing up, I've been there in my head many times. I think someday I will see it, when things are different there, but I've come to feel like I really am a Miami girl.

With all of the people in Cuba who I met - many of them hugely heroic figures - I found learning about their complexity and richness and contradictions just really fascinating, and it was fulfilling to be able to offer a different side to them, to be able to have some kind of unique takeaway from the official narrative.

I think that I've tried many times to get Cuba in my writings, especially Havana, which was once a great and fascinating city.

I've been to Cuba many times.

Living in Cuba made me unafraid of whatever could happen to me.

I was born in Cuba, and my parents were tropical agronomists.

Both of my parents were born into poor families on the island of Cuba. They came to America because it was the only place where people like them could have a chance.

People in Cuba are victims.

It didn't get any more glamorous than Havana, Cuba, in the 1950s. I used to go there when I was a waiter on a cruise ship.

At the age of 6, a teacher full of ambitions, who taught in the small public school of Biran, convinced my family that I should travel to Santiago de Cuba to accompany my older sister who would enter a highly prestigious convent school. Including me was a skill of that very teacher from the little school in Biran.