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R. Hart Phillips

Ruby Hart Phillips (December 12, 1902 - October 28, 1985) was a New York Times correspondent in Cuba who covered the Batista regime and the rise of Fidel Castro. She reported from the island for 24...view moreRuby Hart Phillips (December 12, 1902 - October 28, 1985) was a New York Times correspondent in Cuba who covered the Batista regime and the rise of Fidel Castro. She reported from the island for 24 years, from 1937 to 1961. Born in 1902 in Okene, Oklahoma, to parents who were descendants of pioneer East Tennessee families, as a young girl Phillips moved around Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, and enrolled in half a dozen schools. She attended a Dallas business school, where she learned basic secretarial skills, and held a series of miscellaneous jobs. She decided to leave the Southwest and moved to Cuba, where she took a job at Westinghouse Electric. There, she met and married James Doyle Phillips, an Arkansan who owned a modest printing shop and translating office. Phillips learned journalism from James, who began contributing to the New York Times in 1931. After James was killed in a stateside car accident in 1937, the Times allowed Phillips to take over as foreign correspondent in Cuba. She also went on to write several books about Cuba. Her first book, Cuba: Island of Paradox, published in 1959, was a personal history of Cuba from 1931 and covered the revolt that deposed the dictator Gerardo Machado, the rise and fall of Batista and the Castro revolution. A second book, The Cuban Dilemma, published in 1962, dealt with the days after Castro took power. Phillips left The Times in 1963 and became the Latin American correspondent for Newsday in Miami, Florida until her retirement several years later. She died in Cocoa Beach, Florida in 1985 at the age of 82.view less