AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was a 1950s Cuban revolutionary who longed to slip into the island’s eastern mountains and join Fidel Castro’s guerrilla army.
At 17, Rafael Cruz led a group of insurgents staging urban sabotage against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Cruz was eventually jailed and tortured, and upon his release wanted the underground to help him personally reach Castro’s camp in the Sierra Maestra highlands.
“My dad asked if he could join Castro in the mountains and keep fighting,” the firebrand Republican presidential candidate writes in his book, “A Time For Truth,” which is being released Tuesday. “But he was told there was no way to get to the rebels.”
Instead, the elder Cruz bribed his way to a Cuban exit visa and headed to the University of Texas.
He returned home shortly after Castro seized power in 1959 but, Ted Cruz writes, was appalled to see Castro had “declared to the world that he was a communist.” Castro didn’t formally call his revolution socialist until the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.