It just goes ta show ya, Larri, that ya learn sumthin new every day!
His father SUPPORTED Castro?...That's disturbing.
I thought he opposed Castro.
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.
Castro did NOT show his true colors in the early days.
He came out as a Marxist only after defeating the Batista regime.
I think that was transcribed incorrectly.
I'll stick with rooting for Ted Cruz, not his father. My dad holds more that a few ideas that I'm not exactly fully behind. So do plenty of FReepers. That doesn't mean that he, or they, wouldn't be better candidates than Hillary or Bernie.
Some of us are maybe older or more familiar with the history than you. During the Bautista days, before Castro took power, his father opposed the dictator’s regime, which meant supporting the jungle rebels they thought to be small “d” democrats. He was imprisoned and tortured for his trouble. That he later escaped Cuba after seeing what Castro was all about makes him just like the many thousands of Cuban Americans of that generation. No reason for concern, and in fact it means his father has seen the raw face of Communism up close and has instilled an understanding of its lies and tricks in his son.
It just goes ta show ya, Larri, that ya learn sumthin new every day!