 late October evening. We have poppies flowering in my garden. I'm wearing no pants. I mean, I'm wearing a skirt. We have no pants in late October. The wonderful part of the evening is Pat and Patterson. I see so many kids here too. I have to get through some business real quickly. If you can mute and turn off your cell phone, that'd be great. The front door is locked, but if you need to leave, you can go out the back door. The bathroom is to the right of the back door if you need that. We'll be serving cake after Catherine talks and signs her books. We've got plenty of books. The cake is gorgeous, so don't forget to take a look even if you don't eat cake. And I'd like to thank Orca for being here tonight. John, thank you for joining us. If you want to see the video or learn more about future events, sign up for a newsletter on the sheet that Sam is going to pass around. You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, blah, blah, blah. On November 14th, this is going to be a great event. Poets resist voices of dissent. We have Muslim girls making change coming from Burlington. We have Reuben Jackson also from Burlington. We have a couple of poets from Boston and the D.C. area. This is going to be $5. This is Tuesday, November 14th at the Unitarian Church. Tickets will go fast, so join us for that. We also have a wish list for the holidays. Come in and sign up for all the goodies that you want, and people can come in and buy your favorite things here for the holidays. Let's move on to the good stuff. How fortunate we are to celebrate another novel written by Ramonso Catherine Patterson. Not only has Catherine's writing been awarded the Newberry Award twice, the National Book Award twice. Not only has she served as the National Ambassador to Young People's Literature in 2010, received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, she's also been named a living legend by the Library of Congress. And most recently, the Vermont Humanities Council has named Bread and Roses 2, the 2018 Vermont Reads Book. Catherine's novels have the uncanny ability to anchor the reader's feet in her character's shoes in every novel she writes. Confidently nestled within her stories, we learn empathy and feel compassion and unbidden curiosity as we learn about people who don't look like us, but feel like our neighbors. Tonight, we're celebrating Catherine's book birthday for my Brigadista year, in which we will be introduced to Laura, a 13-year-old Cuban who wants to volunteer for Castro's countrywide literacy campaign in 1961. Laura's innocent and unaffected enthusiasm carries us into the compo, where we shall overcome is the Brigadista's motto. Thank you, Catherine, for joining us tonight and for sharing your humanist vision with your readers. Your stories shine a light on the unlikely places, giving us the hope we surely need. I'm not trying to live up to that, but we'll see. I met Auburn Richie in the elevator, and it was raining, and I said, well, he said, he was coming tonight, and I said, well, it may be just you and me all, and Jane. I was sure Jane would be here, but thank you very much for coming on this very rainy night, and this very peculiar month. I was just in Boston, and the crowd was much slimmer, and everybody was on the common because their mother was so gorgeous, so I thought, okay, one day it's really gorgeous, the next day it's pouring down right, everybody's got an excuse not to come, but we were mothers for our heart and blood. So thank you very much for being here. My father lived in China for 18 years, and I made the mistake of telling him I was writing a novel set in China, and he gave me this amused grin, and he said, well, they say if you're in China for a week, you can write a novel or a book. If you're there for a month, you can write an article. If you live there for a year, you can write a pamphlet, but if you live there for 10 years, you can't say a word. So despite my father's wise words, I went on and wrote the book called Rebels in Heaven and Kingdom, and I'm very sad to say he died before it was published, so he never got to give me his review on the book that I wrote, having left China when I was eight years old, not getting there for, I mean, being there more than a week and not for 10 years that would have shut me up. But I couldn't help but think about him when I began to write my British Year, so I need to start with a few facts. I was born in China and not in Cuba. I have at some point in my life been fluent both in Chinese and Japanese, and have studied Latin, Greek, and French, but I'm still wandering in the wilderness when it comes to Spanish. I have lived for extended periods in three different countries and seven states, but never in Cuba. So why have I written a story set in Cuba, and even more, why have I written a novel about a 13-year-old Cuban girl in first person? After all, I am or actually will be in 10 days, an 85-year-old gringo living in Vermont, so I think I need to explain this to my departed father, if not to my prospective readers. Now, I want to point out that there are a couple of people in this audience that are totally responsible for my having dared to write this book, and the first one is Mary Day, he's here on the second row, and it's all her fault, if you think I shouldn't have done this. No, no, partly her fault, partly you assume it's her fault, but it started with Mary, because we were at the State House for my friend Nancy Graf's book on the State House, and I saw Mary, and I was so glad to see her. I hadn't seen her in a long time, and she asked me what I was up to, and I said, well, I was getting ready to go back to Cuba for another visit, and she said, oh, I'm so jealous now, she can quote my, I mean, correct my quotation afterwards if she wants to, she said, I'm so jealous, Pat gets to go there all the time, and I've never been, and then she said, when I began working with adult basic education in Vermont, I was inspired by the literacy campaign in Cuba, and I thought, huh, what literacy campaign? And I mean, I had been to one literacy conference in Cuba, which was for all of Latin America, and I never heard about the literacy campaign when I was there, and I was just about to go to this same conference, which meets every two years, so I thought I better find out about the literacy campaign in Cuba, and Mary is the one who pointed me to Jonathan Kozel's book, Children of the Revolution, which is about the 1961 literacy campaign in Cuba. Now, how many of you all had really ever heard of the 1961 literacy campaign in Cuba? There are some people here who are smarter than I was and knew more than I did, but, well, hi, I'm sorry if I don't call you by a name than I mean to, because I'm so glad to see so many friends here tonight. Anyhow, Fidel Castro, I should probably know, marched into Havana the first week of January in 1959, having sent the dictator Batista flying away to exile, and in 1960, which was the following year, he spoke to the United Nations, and in that talk to the United Nations, he said, in one year, Cuba will be a totally literate nation, and of course everybody went whoo-hoo-hoo. He came back to Cuba and he asked for volunteers. The numbers vary, but anyhow, there's something over 700,000 Cubans volunteer. He said, if you know how to read and write, you need to teach someone else how to read and write. More than half of those volunteers were female, and about 108,000 were between the ages of 12 and 18. So you have to imagine these young Cuban, especially girls, who had never been allowed practically on the street by themselves, one of them said, and I borrowed what she said. I'd never even spent the night at my grandmother's house. I'd never spent a night away from home. They leave their comfortable homes in the city, and they go up into the mountains where there's no electricity, no plumbing, no running water, and they go to the river and fetch the water. They will arch their laundry on the rocks of the river. They work beside the campesinos in the fields by day, and then at night, under these huge lanterns provided by the Chinese government, they teach the campesinos how to read and write. At the end of the year, the human observers said that Cuba was an illiteracy-free nation, and there was a tiny bit of illiteracy left if you look at the figures really well. But today Cuba's literacy rate is between 99.7% and 99.9%. There's a little quibble there, but our literacy rate in 2014, when the census was taken, was 84%, and it hadn't changed in 10 years. So it was a remarkable thing that these volunteers accomplished. The youngest volunteer was seven years old, and insisted that she could read and write well, so the officials kind of tested her, and yes, indeed, she could read and write very well, so they gave her a neighbor in to teach how to read and write. And then the oldest student was a 106-year-old woman who learned how to read and write. So these are absolutely wonderful stories. After I began to research this, because I thought, I'm going to this literacy and literature conference in Cuba. I want to make this a part of my talk. And I also got Mary, because you know how hard it is to get messages to Washington. Got Mary's help so that I got a letter from Senator Lay to read at the conference, because he's a big hero down there, and I thought, I can't go wrong if I haven't read it from Senator Lay greeting the conferees. So I thought, well, I'm going to talk about this wonderful literacy campaign to all these people from Latin America who are working in literacy. I sent my speech to be in turn to be translated to a woman named Isabel Serrano. And Isabel wrote back, and she said, you knew that Emilia was a providista. Now, Emilia is the one who's been running this conference every two years, for many years now. I mean, it's one of these people that I asked my friend, Patsy, why isn't Emilia in jail because she is so outspoken. And when I found out that she had indeed been one of these providistas at the hall, that explains it. Because this was a changing, a life-changing experience for these young girls. They found out what they could do. And one of the wonderful resources which I want to recommend to you is a movie named Maestra, which is, of course, those of you who know Spanish know that that's a female word for teacher. And the film is made by a documented filmmaker named Catherine Murphy, whose parents and grandparents had lived in Cuba. And she had left at the time of the revolution. And she had heard all the wonderful stories about Cuba pre-Castro. And then, of course, her family was very anti-Castro. And as she grew older, she thought, well, maybe there's some stories that I haven't heard because of my family's bias. And someone told her about this wonderful woman in Cuba who was a world renowned architect. And she thought, well, that would make a wonderful documentary film to meet Daisy Fieta. And so she began doing some research. And someone would say, well, if you want her to interview her, you better come because she's got cancer. And nobody knows how long she's going to live. So she went to Cuba to interview this wonderful woman. And the woman began to talk about her beauties to the year that had changed her life and had made her realize that she could really be someone in her own right, not just a teenager being groomed for a proper marriage. And then the more Daisy talked, the more she realized that there were all these other women in places of amazing women. And they traced why they had become, what they had become to their year, to the year 1961, when they had been Brigadistas. So the movie interviews nine of these women. And they have done Daisy, of course, as a world renowned architect, not in our country, but in other, in Europe and certainly in Cuba. There's a woman who is a graphic artist. There's a woman who's certainly one who is a college professor. There's, as my friend Amidia was, there's a woman who is an urban planner. One of the more interesting women in the trailer that I was not able to show you, that she was determined to become a biochemist because she'd been blowing up things in her house. But of course her family would never commit anything like that. And she wouldn't have any money to go to university. But one of the first things that Castro promised was if you joined, that you would have free education. And then she knew if she joined, she could go to university and she didn't become a biochemist. She became a social psychologist. And I've seen other interviews with her because she's come to this country to speak from time to time. And she's a very strong advocate not only for the Afro-Cuban population, but for the LGBTQ population, remarkable woman. So that's what happened to these girls in later years, which is really quite, quite wonderful. The year was not an easy year for any of them. Not only was it physically difficult, but the Bay of Pigs happened in April. And the invaders who were not either killed or captured fled into the mountains. And one of the things they had decided to do was to try to eradicate or end the literacy campaign. I'm not sure why. I know generally speaking dictators do not like people to read and write. You know, I come from the south. I know it was against the law for slaves to read and write and for anyone to teach them to read and write because you can't oppress people very well if they can read and write because reading is a revolutionary activity. So it's kind of interesting to me that Fidel Castro, who was a dictator, and did things that none of us admire at all. He caused a lot of suffering, but he also did some wonderful things for the Cuban people. And he did believe that he couldn't have a strong citizenry unless everybody could read and write. So they not only have this remarkable literacy rate, they have free education from preschool through doctoral programs. They have an excellent medical system, which is available to every single Cuban. So, you know, we don't often hear good things about our enemies, but I think maybe we should. And maybe they wouldn't be our enemies anymore. So anyhow, that's sort of what happened. I'm going with your permission just read a short passage from the book, and then I'll be happy to try to answer questions. Some of them I will not be able to answer, but there might be someone in the audience who knows about this program who could answer it. I have too many things here. I hid my water for myself. It had been no warning of danger, and if not for the animals, we would never have known. Nancy was busy writing and rewriting her letter. She had pushed herself to finish her exams because next month her baby would be born. Writing the letter was proving much harder for her than the rest of the exam. She was so big of a perfectionist and could not tolerate a single erasure. Look, she said as justedly, you can still see the mistake underneath. I have to do it over. It has to be beautiful if it is to go to Havana. Rafael was racing Daniel and his mother, determined to beat them both through the Prima, and Daniel was just as determined not to let a six-year-old triumph. I was beginning to have real hope that most, if not all of my students, would complete their three exams before December. I was working hard with Dunia, and we, as usual, was tutoring Joaquin. The Elder Acosta had finally passed, if the Elder Acostas had finally passed their second exams, but were struggling with the lessons leading to the third. Nothing but long words Joaquin complained loudly. I can read the little ones, but now they're all as long as a water snake. I could hardly disagree. He'd gone from words like house and hill to words like industry and revolutionary government. A bit of a distance for an old man who had first met the alphabet just a few months earlier. Luis broke the words into syllables and drilled the old man until he was nearly crying for mercy. But Luis was a stern teacher who wasted no pity. If you don't learn these words, you can't write your letters to Fidel, and poor Laura will go home feeling like a faggot. Besides the Elder, do you want your wife to finish first? Dunia is not letting the long words defeat her. Remember, our motto is, we shall prevail, not we try, but the birds were too low. Can we whine and gave up? But even if I learned the words, you say I have to make these little marks over some, but not all of the letters, and to put a squiggle above the enne. The old man complained. That's too much for my old brains to remember. I guess those evil spandits invented all that as well. Yes, Sir Luis, I'm sure they did. But now they make good Cuban words. Besides, I think the marks and squiggles, as you say, are pretty. Would you want your language to look as dull and undecorated as North American English? I was almost beginning to think it was a good thing that Luis had broken his leg. He was such a help, and I knew I needed a lot if I was going to get all of them through the last test before the end of the campaign. We were deep into our lessons. Veronica was determined to pass her final exam before her son did, and I was in the middle of the dictation section when Luis suddenly said, hush. I stopped reading aloud, and we all listened. The animals, he whispered, something is out there. And then we all heard them. The chickens were cackling excitedly. The pigs were squealing, and even the oxen and goats were making anxious pleats. Luis grabbed a crutch, and as he struggled to his feet, whispered, douse the lamps a lot. Daniel jumped up to obey. Luis pushed back from the table, shoved aside the blanket, and stumped his way into the kitchen. The animal protest grew louder. Then we heard shouting in a bam, bam, bam on the front door. Open up. We know you have a briefing stand there. For a moment we sat there frozen. Then Rafael let our muffle cry. Mama. Veronica put her arm around him. The banging and yelling continued. Suddenly it was interrupted by Luis's voice. I will not open my door to criminals, but be aware that I also have a rifle, and if you bandidos try to enter this house, you will not see another morning. I never knew Luis still had a rifle. He was banging on the back of the door with something that sounded like the point of a gun. There was some muffle talking outside, and again Luis's strong voice. If you're trying to break in, just remember, I'm in the dark, and you're in the moonlight. You won't see who's killed you until you reach the gates of hell. There were a few more half-hearted bams on the door, and then we'll be back. There were some more threats thrown back at the house, as apparently the insurgents drifted toward the woods. I thought I heard in the distance the sound of a piglet squealing. When only the chirp of insects broke the silence of the night, Luis came back into the bedroom. Daniel relifted the lamp and revealed Luis standing in the doorway with a broom in his hand. He dropped it and gave an embarrassed titter. I guess I can look through my weapon now, he said cheaply. For a long while we sat silently around the table. Finally Daniel stood up. It's safe to go, he announced, and we have animals to care for in the morning. We all went out to watch them go, peering anxiously toward the dark forest. When they disappeared into the shadows, we stepped back in, and Luis bolted the door. On her mattress, Isabel turned over with a sigh. I looked down. The little girls had slept through it all. Sleep if you can, Laura. Luis said, the animals will wake me if there's danger. It was a hot October night, and the air in the small back room was stuffy. But all they shivering in my hammock as cold as the fish on ice. From the woods in Alice screeched, I jumped. I won't be 14 until November 5th. I'm too young to die. I don't think I've said words aloud, but they were pounding as noisily in my head as if I had. I pulled my almost forgotten rosary out from under my nightdress, and tried to smother my fear with a succession of our fathers and Hail Marys. Dear Mother of God, don't let me die out here so far from my own mother. Even if they don't kill me, won't I be putting my beloved new family in danger just by being here? It's too hard. The thought hit me like a bullet to the chest. I promised to go home when it got too hard. I have to acknowledge a couple more people. One is that when I came back from Cuba, just full of all the things I'd learned and the fact that my friend in media had been a Brigadier, and that those kids had done this amazing thing. I was talking about it. Leader Schubert said, you should write that story, and it really hadn't occurred to me. I should write that story, not being Cuban or even Spanish-speaking. And then the moral thought about it, the moral thought, but nobody else has written that story for young people. And it's a wonderful story that we should all know. So I've known Karen Lotz at Candlewick since she was barely out of college, and my editor of 40-plus years is no longer editing. So I really had thought that I was never going to write another novel, because Virginia could no longer edit, and my husband John died, and they were my two chief editors and supports for all the years in my writing. But I did want to write a story, and I thought, well, maybe I could do a nonfiction book or one of those pictures, nonfiction books that are so attractive these days are called informational books now, I think, which is better. And so I got in touch with my friend Karen Lotz, who since I've known her since she was very young, I feel that she imposes. And I said, Karen, you know, I have this wonderful story about the literacy campaign in Cuba in 1961. And how would you, would you be interested in a book like that? And she said, I certainly would. And I said, well, I was thinking about, you know, a picture book. She said, I hear the excitement in your voice, I think it should be a novel. And so I went, really? Anyhow, so I began to write the book, and it was a truly a joy to write. I really thought I was never going to write a novel, and here I was. And I'd forgotten how much I loved, I loved to write. And, you know, I thought when I couldn't write, well John was sitting after he died, I thought, well, you know, it's no tragedy, I can read. I would lie down and die if I couldn't read, but I certainly couldn't lie down and die if I can't write, I've always been more of a reader than a writer anyhow. So, but I had forgotten how much I loved it. And so it was a real joy to write it. And I have to also acknowledge, Aidan Savins, who's sitting there, is looking shy, because I'm talking about it. But Aidan helps me in a number of ways with my, since I don't have a secretary or anybody that does anything like that for me, Aidan comes when I'm desperate. And so he helped me do the timeline for the book. So we have a timeline, and then they've got a map. And we've expanded the timeline because everybody who knew anything thought their thing should be in the timeline. I was just going to be a brief timeline, but it's several pages long now. And you'll know more than you ever wanted to know about, or maybe not more than you wanted to know, but you'll know a lot about human history if you study it. So I just wanted to say, and that's a graph back there who read an early draft and urged me to flesh it out more. So anybody else want to take credit for this book? Absolutely, absolutely invited to. I did have an awful lot of help, but I'm supposed to answer questions. And how long, Jane? Where's Jane? Okay, so anybody wants to leave? I never mind. Just try not to make too much noise. So are there any questions that I can give? And if I can't answer, we've got these some of these experts here who probably can. Yeah, Americans that escaped on the Bay Pigs, the Americans went up in the hill? No, no, no, no, they were Cubans. They were Cubans. But they were backed by the US Navy. It was pretty much surrounding Cuba. The planes that flew overhead, Batista didn't have any planes anymore. And the planes that flew overhead before the the invasion had Cuban flags on them, so they weren't shot down because they were considered to be friendly planes until they started dropping bombs. So, you know, we don't have a very good history with Cuba. So, starting back a long way. Was there a reason why why the United States funded people to try to break that effort? I think I think the problem was, you know, the whole fear of communism and the fear that humans would line up with the Soviet Union, which of course they did. There wasn't any hope from North America, so of course they went to Soviet Union. And Fidel was socialist and maybe communist, but I think it would have been a different history if we had, just like in Vietnam, if we had recognized Ho Chi Minh instead of, I mean, initially we thought he was a good guy. And I don't think that the United States, in fact Eisenhower had stopped funding Batista the year before his fall because he was, the corruption was so terrible. And Batista was just hanging glove with American mafia. So, it wasn't that, that he was such a great guy and it was too bad that he left. I mean, they were a lot of Cubans who were very happy when he left. I would like to add, I mean, part of it was they also didn't want to spread to the rest of Latin America. I'm sorry, George. I mean, they didn't want the communism to fall. Yes, yes, it was the whole domino theory. If you, one nation goes and all that. There were a lot of Latinos who came and went and also told me at the time, too, wasn't just Cubans. I think I'm gonna have to give you a mic. There was a lot of people from Latin America who went there and also backed the education system in Cuba. Yeah, and so yeah, George is saying that there were a lot of Latin Americans who went to Cuba and backed the education system in Cuba. And there was a, I think he's Brazilian and you could probably correct me on that, who sort of pioneered the idea that Castro took for the primers and things like that that were used. And of course the primers had two purposes. I don't always teach people to read and write, but to teach them about the revolutionary government, as you can notice from the section I read. So they were not just Dick and Jane by any means. They had two purposes to tell these farmers about the new government. I see a hand right here. Oh, and there's one way up there. Well, may I read you what a part of Amida's letter after... This is Brad time, but before I do that, there's a very patient person way up in the back who, Lisa, you. Oh, yeah. Yeah, one of the farmers' wives was going to have a baby, and the baby is a boy and gets born a few chapters later. That's very important thing in the story. I'll read this and then we'll go eat cake and have fun. I sent the final book, because I've just got that on Friday, but I sent an earlier manuscript of the book because I wanted to make sure that Amida, whose name is prominently in the dedication, would approve of it. And I'm not reading you the sloppiest part of the letter, but she's telling me how wonderful I am. I have my humble humility to monitor the audience. My dearest Catherine, at last, and thanks to this translation, I've been able to calmly read your novel, giving it the attention it deserves. I've been excited by your perception of a reality, of an experience which was like that, just as you have described it, caring, complex, adventurous, and profound, which undoubtedly can only come from the best place which each person has. I think that if I hadn't read everything you've written, which was translated in Spanish, or if I hadn't had the privilege of hugging you and listening to you on more than one occasion, it would have been very difficult for me to understand how someone who wasn't there and who didn't go through that experience, the most beautiful one of my adolescence, has been able to capture the feeling that moved us, and which was no other than the detachment, and essentially the surrender, a selfless act of love. I find it truly ironic that in that same year, 1961, a young American president got up and said, ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Well, Fidel was asking that of his population and his young people, and it just seems so tragic to me that they were set on this collision course from the very first. I can't tell readers how to read my books, but I would love it if young people in this country were reading about what the young people there did might discover that they have received, that they can also give themselves to selfless acts of love, and then they might discover as the Brigadistas all said that they received more than they gave. One Brigadista said that I taught the Campesinas how to read and write, and they taught me how to be a person.