Ruth Behar's research in Sapiens
Professor Ruth Behar's work in Cuba is highlighted in this article in Sapiens:
Lifting the Emotional Embargo With Cuba
As Behar listened, and later as she read from her own poetry and from her forthcoming novel Lucky Broken Girl, her heart pounded, not from nerves but from hope. She was spending the afternoon with two good friends who live in countries that have historically been at odds—countries that form the halves of her own identity—and the relationship between their governments was starting to relax. There was no microphone in the room, but Behar didn’t need one to read. Her lungs felt full of air, her body loose. “Totally present,” she recalls of the moment. “Just being there.”
Traveling with an old friend, and giving public performances, was a departure from Behar’s usual work in Cuba. Since the early 1990s, the professor has visited at least 50 times, generally alone, to study the island’s small Jewish community. But 2015 was shaping up as an extraordinary year in the history of U.S.-Cuba relations, and to her it demanded an unorthodox anthropology.