Is it plausible that he would not have known of Castro's brutal repression?
Someone has him confused with his father:
Cruz’s father, who was born in 1939 in Matanzas, Cuba,[13][14] as Robert T. Garrett of the Dallas Morning News has described, “suffered beatings and imprisonment for protesting the oppressive regime”[13][18] of dictator Fulgencio Batista. He fought for communist revolutionary Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution[19][20] when he was 14 years old, but “didn’t know Castro was a Communist.” A few years later he became a staunch critic of Castro when “the rebel leader took control and began seizing private property and suppressing dissent.”[13][21] The elder Cruz fled Cuba in 1957 at the age of 18, landing in Austin,[18] becoming a Cuban émigré, to study at the University of Texas, knowing no English and with $100 sewn into his underwear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz
The writer apparently has Senator Cruz confused with his dad -- who fought against the Batista regime with Castro, then fought against Castro when he revealed his true Communist colors.
I've no idea where she got this particular story, though.
That was either bad writing or on purpose by the writer.
It was the dad who did it.
“”His father, Rafael, as a teen-ager in Cuba, fought alongside Castro’s revolutionaries against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was jailed and beaten by the regime. “My grandmother said that his suit, which had started out bright white, you couldn’t see a spot of white on it,” Cruz said. “It was just stained with blood and mud, and his teeth were dangling from his mouth.” Rafael left for the United States, and in 1957 started at the University of Texas on a student visa. He continued to support Castro. “He learned English very quickly and began going around to local Rotary Clubs and Kiwanis Clubs and speaking about the Revolution and raising money for Castro,” Cruz said. “He was a young revolutionary. He would get Austin businesspeople to write checks.”
When Castro came to power, in 1959, the elder Cruz quickly grew disillusioned. His younger sister fought in the counter-revolution and was tortured by the new regime. Rafael returned to Cuba in 1960 to see his family, and was shaken by what Castro’s Communist dictatorship had wrought. “When my father got back to Austin,” Cruz said, “he sat down and made a list of every place he’d gone to speak, and he made a point of going back to each of them and standing in front of them and saying, ‘I owe you an apology. I misled you. I took your money and I sent it to evil ends.’ And he said, ‘I didn’t do so knowingly, but I did so nonetheless, and for that I’m truly sorry.’ When I was a kid, my dad told me that story over and over again. To me, that always defined character: to have the courage to go back and apologize.”””
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/11/19/121119fa_fact_lizza?currentPage=all
Well Eisenhower was shocked, and the US financed Castro's revolution.