Zita Arocha is an award-winning bilingual journalist, writer, and educator. She left Cuba with her parents at age four in 1957, returned briefly two years later to visit relatives and instead witnessed the start of a cataclysmic social revolution. She has traveled to Cuba many times over the decades as a journalist and to see family. She has reported for The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and national publications. She taught journalism at the University of Texas for two decades and led the National Association of Hispanic Journalists in the 90s and again in 2021. She was raised in Tampa, once considered the cigar capital of the world. She now lives in southern New Mexico with her husband, David Smith Soto, and three dogs, Sophie, Chico, and Rayo, whom they like to walk along the banks of the nearby Rio Grande.