Their Man in Havana

As the Cuban rebellion reached a climax last week, the New York Times's Page One stories out of taut Havana ran under the familiar byline of R. Hart Phillips, Cuba correspondent for the Times since 1937. What few Timesreaders knew was that War-and-Peace Correspondent R. Hart Phillips is a 58-year-old widow.

Timeswoman Ruby Phillips has outlasted eleven Cuban governments, and has had a way with all of them. "Ruby knows as much about Cuba as I do," says ex-President Ramon Grau San Martin. Fulgencio Batista admired and respected the Timeslady. "Although Batista has no reason to be fond of our coverage," said Emanuel R. Freedman, the Times's foreign news editor and Ruby's boss, "she still enjoys his confidence." Ruby herself says simply: "I have good connections in every faction in Cuba."

Oklahoma-born, Ruby Hart went to Cuba in 1923 as a Spanish-speaking stenographer, met and married James Doyle Phillips, another Stateside immigrant and proprietor of a modest printing and translating office. (Their daughter Marta is now a dancer in Madrid.) In 1931, with insurgent winds blowing all over Cuba, the Times took Phillips on as its Havana correspondent, and Ruby became his legman. When he was killed in an auto accident in 1937, Ruby took over his job. She has reigned since as the only resident U.S. newspaper correspondent in Cuba (although U.P.I, and A.P. maintain one-man bureaus), developing a reputation for balanced, if colorless reporting.

At her downtown office, a block from Havana's Presidential Palace, Ruby cuts an enduring, familiar figure, togged in grey sweater, carmine blouse and blue slacks. Unruffled by habitual administrative alterations, most of them punctuated by gunfire, outside her green door, she occasionally makes a revolution sound like a Long Beach reunion of ex-Iowans. From her accounts (and other Times stories last week) the reader got little impression of the violent executions decreed by the Castro forces.

Thoroughly versed in the maze of Cuban politics, Ruby does most of her reporting from her desk, gets many of her leads from her radio, which blares steadily in competition with a tape recorder, a television set, and a green parrot, all in the same room. Last week, as Fidel Castro's triumphant procession passed within view of her office, she emerged for her first look at the rebel chieftain. Castro had already paid his respects to her; last November he sent a runner 600 miles with a mountain orchid for the Timeswoman in Havana. Placid and permanent in Cuba's impermanent atmosphere, R. Hart Phillips will be on good terms with Castro's regime. And, chances are, she will be on equally good terms with the regime that follows Castro's.

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