Dr. Helen I. Safa awarded

2009 Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Contributions to Cuban Studies

LASA- Cuba Section

 Premio a la Excelencia Académica en los Estudios sobre Cuba

de la Sección Cuba de LASA, 2009

Recognition read by Sheryl Lutjens at the Section Business Meeting, Friday, June 12, 2009.

This year we received nominations for five outstanding candidates for the Section Prize for Lifetime Contribution to the field of Cuban Studies.   In our deliberations, the Prize Committee (Jorge Mario Sánchez Egozcue, Mayra Espina, Gary Prevost, and Sheryl Lutjens) was able to identify one of these five as the recipient of the 2009 Prize.  This year’s award for Lifetime Scholarly Contribution to the field of Cuban Studies goes to Dr. Helen Safa, Professor Emerita of Anthropology and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida.  

Let me read from her nomination.

“Helen first traveled to Cuba in 1977 and was impressed by the relative isolation of Cuban scholars from the leading theoretical developments in Latin American Studies during that decade, including feminist scholarship.  She became determined not only to link Cuban scholars to their counterparts in the US, but also to pursue primary research on gender issues in Cuba.

Helen was one of the first US scholars to carry out field research in Cuba and specifically on Cuban women.  In the late 1980s, in collaboration with researchers affiliated with the Cuban Women’s Federation she carried out ethnographic as well as survey research on women workers in the textile industry.  Much of this material was incorporated into The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean, published in 1995, a comparative study of women industrial workers in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. 

Dr. Safa was President of LASA from 1983 to 1984.  One of her major initiatives as LASA president was to obtain funding from the Ford Foundation to establish an innovative program of working groups that included US-based and Cuban scholars and which alternated between meeting in Havana and on US campuses.  For many of us, the Cuba Working Groups provided the first opportunity to either travel to Cuba, do research on Cuba, or engage in collaborative research with Cuban scholars.  Helen subsequently chaired and has been a continual member of the Cuba Task Force, today the LASA-Cuba Section

Her research on women and support of feminist scholars had tremendous influence on the development of the field of Women’s Studies in Cuba.  But Helen’s initiatives in support of the broader field of Cuban Studies had its costs back home, in Florida.  Helen invited many Cuban scholars to lecture on campus in a period when self-censorship on the Cuba issue had become the norm at UF.  She acquired the reputation of being the “Red Queen” of Florida and her tenure as Director of the UF Center for Latin American Studies was cut short under pressure from Cuban-American legislators in Tallahassee.”

The Prize Committee echoes these words of praise in our selection of Helen Safa as the recipient of the 2009 award.  Her contributions are distinctive, marked by the human, not simply professional or administrative, dimensions of the relations she has nurtured through her work; marked by her special capacity to motivate others to join with her in efforts to sustain and expand academic relationships and the solidarity this creates among us; by her steadfastness over the decades, despite the difficulties that have often discouraged others along the way; and by a professional excellence that is recognized within the multicultural spaces of LASA and elsewhere.  Not only was Helen Safa a pioneer in charting a path for academic relations between the United States and Cuba, but she remains a vital reference point for many of us in Cuban Studies--as a scholar, an anthropologist, a feminist, and a friend.