Bridges to Cuba is a collection of art, poetry, personal essays, and fiction written by Cubans on both sides of the straits of Florida.

A magnificent attempt to bring together all who are Cuban by birth, to share the complexities of what it has been like to be separated these many years. The submissions in this book capture magnificently the diversity of experiences, thoughts, emotions and conflicts caused by the separation of Cubans from each other, and for many, from the land of their birth. Having been born in Cuba and having lived in the U.S. for the last forty years, the contributions in this book spoke personally to me in a way that nothing I have ever read before has done. But the beauty of this book and the gift Behar has given, is to present the challenges and emotional depth of separation that all us feel in our lives. Each contribution gives us a different perspective, a unique view of the subject, and a deeper understanding of what it is like to be separated from that and those which we love.

Ruth, thank you.

I had the pleasure of being a student of Ms. Behar and she is a wonderful woman. It's no surprise that her book is as informative and exciting as the class. I only wish I had asked her to sign it...

An inspired and insightful book! Women Writing Culture is a must read for feminist anthropologists. This book provides a wealthy historical base imperative to new up and comings in academia. The biographical pieces offer a sense of community to anthropologists and gender studies majors and the fresh, new voices offer a challenge to take feminist anthropology and gender studies to the next level. Additional to the many perks this book offers to students and others surviving in academia, it is also written in accecible language so that the general public reading for pleasure may understand and enjoy it as well. Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordan challege their readers to think outside of the popularly accepted boundaries of women's studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies. Stepping outside of this box can be uncomfortable, but I'll guess that you'll find that "uncomfortable" is where you'll rather be.

Behar's book addresses borders as both metaphors and reality in a facinating way, yet other than that, this book fails miserably due to her experiments with the construction of her text. Overall, the historical development of ethnographic representation would have been better served if Behar had decided to write her book in a different style that better represents the ethnographic aspect of her text.

This is a beautiful narrative that crosses the boundaries of culture, class and gender to let the reader see life through the eyes of an uneducated Mexican woman. The authors tells the extraordinary story of Esperansa's life and the friendship she developed with her. (The author is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan).

In spite of the authors background, the style is rich and unique. The book would be easy read and very entertaining for people able to appreciate women's perceptions and spirituality in unprejudiced manner. I have very different backgound from both the writer and the main character and yet could relate to the story and the experience. It made me re-think my own cross cultural experiences and identity of a woman.

I read this book years ago and loved it. Esperanza is a Mexican woman who tells her story to the author--and it's a wonderful, engrossing story. Ruth Behar is an anthropologist, but this work is not strictly anthropology. There is much empathy and feeling in the writing, and we are brought personally into the world of Esperanza, a very brave woman who has suffered much. The story opened my eyes to the lives of people who live to the south of the U.S. in a way that has stayed with me since reading it.

I found Bettinger-Lopez's work very impressive, especially considering that the vast majority of her research was conducted for an undergraduate thesis. Bettinger-Lopez clearly spent a great deal of time conducting personal interviews and was able to get "inside" the Cuban-Jewish community. As the daughter of a Cuban-Jewish emigre to the U.S. (to New York) who still has many Cuban-Jewish friends and family members in Miami, I truly enjoyed the author's vivid, detailed portraits of the community. Bettinger-Lopez also provided interesting anthropologic and feminist analysis of the Cuban-Jewish community. I did, however, find one aspect of the book troubling, and that is Bettinger-Lopez's tendency to frequently inject herself and her personal issues into the analysis of the people that she interviews. While this technique is interesting at times, it comes off as mildly self-centered and lacks the detachment required of a primary source researcher. Overall, I recommend the book and especially recommend it to Cuban-Jews and their descendants.

While I applaud the author's stated intention of injecting personal insight and empathy into a discipline that has long been characterized by often falsely objective posturing, this collection left me highly dissatisfied. The effect of her essays was to make anthropology just another of the many contemporary genres that inflate "personal experience," rendering it melodramatic and marketable. If I were more interested in the individual doing the telling, perhaps the book would be more compelling, and I found myself reading on in the hope that at some point the author would succeed in making herself an interesting subject. Unfortunately, the finale left me with the suspicion that she is not a particularly good writer, though she may be a very good academic, one who sells books to boot.

This book brings to life the fact that it is not possible to separate science from discourse. It shows through its essays that what sees the fact is not the impartial researcher's eye (does it exist?) but the value-stricken vision of the observer.
In this sense, we are all vulnerable observers. A must for those worried about the deep questions posed by science as a neutral practice. All of us are part of a web of meanings that makes us understand the world and comprehend a fact as a fact. Good reading for those who think positively as well.

As an anthropology student in pursue of the human face of my career I found the light at the end of the tunnel when I read the Vulnerable Observer...and as a Cuban in exile, the book broke also my heart...Not only Dr. Behar marvelously demonstrates the humanness of the hands and mind behind the typewriter (actually behind the keyboard), but she also opens the doors for those of us who want to be visible to the reader, and not precisely as narcissists but because as she says in her book "...The exposure of the self who is also a spectator has to take us somewhere we couldn't otherwise get to. It has to be essential to the argument, not a decorative flourish, not exposure for its own sake. It has to move us beyond that eclipse into inertia ..., in which we find ourselves identifying so intensively with those whom we are observing that all possibility of reporting is arrested, made inconceivable. It has to persuade us of the wisdom of not leaving the writing pad blank" (Behar, 14). We need more anthropology like this and more anthropologists like her...

Another vulnarable observer...