Biography
Ruby Hart was born to John Hart, a cattle merchant, in 1900 in Oklahoma. As a young woman, she moved around Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, and enrolled in half a dozen schools. Eventually she learned basic secretarial skills in a Dallas business school, then held a series of miscellaneous jobs. She decided to leave the Southwest and moved to Cuba, where she took a job at Westinghouse Electric.
In Havana she met and married James Doyle Phillips, another American expatriate. 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, despite the fact she had virtually no journalistic experience. Phillips used the byline "R. Hart Phillips" to disguise that she was a woman, since female foreign correspondents were highly unusual at the time. She wrote several books about Cuba.
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