Cuban Peers Dispute Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro

[applegrove]

Cuban Peers Dispute Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro

By JASON HOROWITZ at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/politics/cuban-peers-dispute-ted-cruzs-fathers-story-of-fighting-for-castro.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

"SNIP...........

MATANZAS, Cuba — Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing Molotov cocktails, running guns and surviving torture.

Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as an increasingly serious contender for the party’s presidential nomination. In their telling, the father’s experience in Cuba — when the country was swept up by the charismatic, young Fidel Castro, only to see him become a repressive Communist dictator — becomes a parable for the son’s nightmarish vision of government overreach under President Obama.



..........

In interviews, Rafael Cruz’s former comrades and friends disputed his description of his role in the Cuban resistance. He was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said — not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.

Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Mr. Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers. “People wishing and praying that Batista would fall,” she said, “but not doing much to act on it.”



...........SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. Seems like you can't enter the republican nomination race unless you have a narrative

that 'arcs' like Star Wars, the first movie.

[LiberalArkie]

2. Surely there has to one of them who is not planning on taking whats left of the money

and rolling it over to a foundation. I figured that is what the Huckster is doing. Don't know about the others.

[guillaumeb]

3. Did Ben Carson help Rafael Cruz Sr. in the resistance? eom

[SoCalDem]

4. Sadly, family "stories" often are untrue

I grew up thinking that my maternal grandfather was from Dublin..

Turns out he was from Uster, and "changed" his birthplace when "the troubles" started

He was long-dead when I found out.