Cuban Peers Dispute Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro
Cuban Peers Dispute Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro
By JASON HOROWITZ
NOV. 9, 2015
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The school records of Rafael Cruz from 1954, when he was about 15 years old. Stories from his upbringing in Cuba, retold by Mr.
Cruz and by his son, who is running for president, have hooked Republican audiences. Credit Lisette Poole for The New York Times
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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 firebombs, 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 a 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.
But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.
The elder Mr. Cruz, 76, recalls a vivid moment at a watershed 1956 battle in Santiago de Cuba, when he was with a hero of the revolution, Frank País, just hours before he was killed in combat.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/politics/cuban-peers-dispute-ted-cruzs-fathers-story-of-fighting-for-castro.html?_r=0
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LBN:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10141255754
