by Ted Cruz
I didn’t go to Washington to join a club. Though I try to treat every senator with civility and respect, I didn’t ever intend to become part of what Reagan once referred to as the “fraternal order” of Republicans. That is certainly not why I leave my wife and two little girls in Texas every Monday morning—because I prefer the warm embrace of Washington.
Our country is in crisis. We cannot keep doing what we’re doing. There comes a point where the hole is too deep, where the debt is too much, where our liberties are too far gone. I don’t believe we’re there yet, but we’re close. It is now or never.
In the Senate, I’ve tried to do two things: tell the truth, and do what I said I would do. We should expect that from every single elected official.
Today is a time for truth.
That is why I am writing this book. Because public officials need to start acting with the best interests of their constituents, not just the next election, in mind. Because we need to hold them accountable and force them to be honest with the American people. The only way to fix Washington is to shift decision making from the smoke-filled rooms in Washington, D.C., back to the grassroots and the people.
The lobbyists and politicians will fight back. They like the status quo, and they want to keep growing Washington and maintaining their power. But they can be overcome. The American people, if informed and if motivated, can be empowered. They can defeat Washington’s corruption.
I’m blessed with a profound appreciation for how great this country is, and about its potential, because of the unusual path I traveled to come to Washington in the first place. It’s a story that started long before I was born. As we start this book, I want to share it with you.
Along the way, I also want to highlight stories of people who have inspired me—truth tellers who challenged the conventions of their day, sometimes at great risk. I would not suggest comparing my short tenure in the Senate to the heroic battles of these titans. But these are men and women whom I respect and admire. All of them shared a deep conviction that if you tell people the truth, the people will find their way to the right decisions.
* America has continuously held a public debt since 1789, with the exception of a single year, 1835.
* During my time in the Senate, I’ve been amazed how many senators pose one way in public—as fiscal conservatives or staunch Tea Party supporters, for example—and then in private do little or nothing to advance those principles. Indeed, if transcripts of our Senate lunches were released to the public, I think many voters would be astonished.
CHAPTER 1
The Beacon
Guillermo Fariñas was a committed communist and devotee of the charismatic leader of pro-Marxist rebels in Angola—a man named Fidel Castro. Fariñas believed in Castro because he believed in communism. He trusted in its promise to end poverty and fell for its critique of capitalism. He mistook its propaganda for news and its predictions for promises. His problem wasn’t that he didn’t care about the truth. His problem was that he didn’t know he hadn’t found it.
And in the late 1970s he was still a boy, not yet eighteen.
While in Angola, Fariñas—who had been dubbed “El Coco” because his large, bald head looked like a coconut—was wounded on the front lines. Because he had proven himself on the battlefield as one of the most committed to the communist cause, a new global order, he received medals from Castro’s army. Then its leaders sent El Coco to the Soviet Union for special military training.
El Coco planned to be a leader of a worldwide movement, a new socialist collective that people like Castro told him would help impoverished people all over the world. But then the young man came across something he did not expect. Something that affected him profoundly.
It was a book by a British author who had been banned in much of the communist world—and is still banned in many totalitarian regimes today.
The book was by George Orwell. And it was called Animal Farm. Written by an Englishman during his nation’s wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, the book used farm characters—a ruthless pig named Napoleon and a courageous one who challenges him, named Snowball—to display the ruthless and perverse nature of Joseph Stalin’s communist totalitarianism. The book demonstrated the perils of forced equality, the power of false propaganda, and the toll that iron-fisted rule exacts on individual freedom. The classic work, which ends in Napoleon’s tragic triumph, struck a chord deep within the young El Coco. Slowly he came to realize he was on the wrong side. And he began a new life that would be guided by one simple rule: Seek the truth, and tell the truth, no matter the consequences.
For decades, Cuba’s secret police had tried to carry out its program of systematic terror in, well, secret, and El Coco did everything possible to change that. He understood that regimes that rely on secrecy fear exposure and attention as much as they fear any weapons, and he knew that hunger strikes offered him the best way to shine a light of the truth of what life in Cuba was—and is—really like. After El Coco returned home to Cuba, he was confronted by a real-life Animal Farm. He watched the brutality of Castro’s security forces and suffered periodic imprisonment for daring to offer opposing political views. And he began a series of grueling hunger strikes designed to highlight the abuse, detention, and murder of his fellow dissidents on the island.
In 2010, the European Parliament awarded Fariñas the Sakharov Prize after an extended hunger strike embarrassed Fidel and Raul Castro into releasing fifty-two political prisoners. Fariñas, however, cautioned that while he was happy they had been released, until there was real political reform in Cuba such episodes were largely cosmetic and would be exploited by the regime: “For the government,” he told the BBC, “political prisoners are a bargaining chip with the civilized world. We are slaves that they can sell when they want.”1
In the course of his journey to receive the Sakharov Prize—a journey that Cuba had forced him to delay for three years—El Coco visited Capitol Hill. Some people probably thought his presence in America was evidence of a new softening of Cuba’s hard-line stance, and an indication that this last front of the Cold War was finally breaking down. But when I met with him and his fellow Cuban dissident Elizardo Sanchez in my Senate office, they assured me that such wishful thinking was far from the truth.
Don’t be fooled, they told me flatly. Their trip was yet another example of the Castros’ exploiting dissidents to trick the United States into thinking they had reformed, while in reality they were consolidating their power. Cuba was “a big jail.” The Castros’ control over it was pervasive. Men and women on the island struggled every day with choices that balanced their dignity with their safety from the secret police. Some choose to become part of the system; others choose to feign mental illness; still others, like El Coco, choose to tell the truth about Cuba and join the opposition, even though it often means abandoning their homes and becoming the targets of relentless mental and physical abuse.
Fariñas and Sanchez warned that the Castros were looking to the example of Vladimir Putin in Russia, who had also projected the illusion of change to the West and won a number of economic and security concessions—and all the while had been carefully orchestrating the reimposition of a centralized control not seen since the days of the Soviets. “Putinismo” they called it. Like Putin, the Castros were sure they could exploit our naïveté and extract concessions from America.
A few weeks later, Fariñas and Sanchez were back in Cuba, once again telling the truth, and once again subjecting themselves to harassment and abuse. The wisdom of their predictions about the Castros’ strategy was vindicated by the president’s stunning announcement on December 17, 2014, that the United States would unilaterally relax the economic embargo on Cuba in exchange for yet another artificial round of political prisoner releases. No meaningful reforms were demanded, and no guarantees were made to prevent Cuba from arbitrarily detaining the released prisoners—and their allies—in the future. And now America would help the Castros pay for their imprisonment.
Just as El Coco predicted.
Some years back, my wife, Heidi, and I were having dinner with friends. During the course of our conversation, a heated argument on some topic or another, one of them stopped me. “Ted,” he asked, “when did you first get interested in politics?”
I replied, “I’m not sure. To be honest, I don’t ever remember a time when I wasn’t.”
This was not the politic answer. Anyone considering running for office, as I was at the time, is supposed to act totally disinterested in the political process, to pose as the reluctant public servant only answering the call because the people need him or her so desperately. But that wasn’t the truth. Not for me.
I told our friends that I’d been interested in politics since I was a young child. “I really don’t know why that is,” I added.
At this point, Heidi flashed the look that only a spouse can give. That of the wife who sees things that are blindingly obvious, except that we are too obtuse to see it ourselves.
“Ted, it’s really no wonder,” she said, laughing. “Think of the family you were raised in.”
I guess most people think of their family as pretty typical, and I was no exception. But not every family is populated by people like Rafael Cruz.
My dad, a Cuban immigrant who sometimes seems larger than life, has always been my hero. He has always felt a visceral urgency about politics. Having the right people in office was vitally important to my dad, as if it were a matter of life and death. Because for him, in a very literal sense, it was.
There isn’t a day that goes by when my thoughts don’t turn to a boy with jet-black hair, a curious mind, and an instinct for rebellion who was just emerging into manhood. He was born to a middle-class family in Cuba and had earned straight A’s in school. His future was filled with possibility, and he might well have prospered under the regime of Fulgencio Batista.
But he and his friends quickly realized the cruelty of Batista’s totalitarianism. He watched in horror as military police beat the government’s opponents. Along with other young students, he secretly allied with an underground movement to replace a cruel and oppressive dictator. The movement was led by Fidel Castro, whose own capacity for tyranny and terror was not yet known—at the time he seemed to hold the promise of freedom. That dark-haired boy became a guerrilla, throwing Molotov cocktails at the buildings of Batista’s regime, whatever the resistance needed.
As the Cuban army began a crackdown, a number of the young man’s cohorts were arrested. Some were shot dead in the streets—a fate he often expected to share. “Praise God that He had a better plan,” he sometimes tells people. The young man was Rafael Bienvenido Cruz. My father.
As it was for so many who hailed from the 780-mile-long strip of mountains in the Caribbean, the island of Cuba began as a place of refuge for the Cruz family. It eventually became a nightmarish horror, a place where possibilities are upended and where hope is routinely and systematically destroyed by an all-controlling and corrupt central government.
Discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, Cuba became one of the earliest Spanish colonies, and from there the Conquistadors launched expeditions into Mexico and Central and South America. These ruthless men slaughtered much of the native Cuban population. In fact, the name of the city where my father was born, Matanzas, literally means “massacre.” The Spaniards killed virtually everyone in the original native village.
For centuries Cubans bristled under the Spanish Empire. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, revolution was brewing. From his exile in the United States, Cuban poet José Martí led impassioned efforts to seek support for a war of independence to free Cuba from Spain. The Spanish government had made it illegal for Cubans to own weapons; only Spanish soldiers were allowed to own guns. And so the Cuban rebels improvised. They used what they had—machetes, the two-foot-long knives that they used to harvest sugarcane. At the cry of “al machete,” the rebels would storm the Spanish army against their musket fire.
When the USS Maine was sunk in the port of Havana in 1898, it precipitated the Spanish-American War. At President William McKinley’s urging, Congress declared war against Spain in April of that year. American troops landed near Santiago, on the southeastern end of the island, and made Guantánamo Bay their base of operations (that base remains a renowned U.S. military outpost to this day). During this short-lived war, Teddy Roosevelt achieved national acclaim by leading his “Rough Riders” to successfully conquer the Spaniards and take San Juan Hill. A few months later the United States and Spain signed a treaty granting Cuba its independence.
It was to this fledgling nation that my great-grandparents arrived in 1902 from the Canary Islands. Agustin and Maria Cruz boarded a ship with their infant son, Rafael, bound for the New World. Their hearts filled with anticipation, a sense of adventure, and a single ambition: to own their own farm. After a decade of hard labor, Agustin had saved enough to buy a few acres of land.
But Agustin died in 1917, one of the millions of lives claimed by a worldwide influenza epidemic. Maria was left a widow with six children. Overcome by despair and depression, Maria ended up being swindled out of their farm. The family had lost everything. Maria and her children were forced to move to a sugarcane plantation. In exchange for her older boys, including Rafael, cutting sugarcane all day, they could live in a hut with a dirt floor.
Life at the plantation was hard. There were a hundred or so huts built in a circle, forming a small village. There was only one general store in the village, owned by the sugar mill, where the workers bought everything from food to tools to clothing and shoes. The store gave the families credit, and the sugar mill paid their salaries through the general store, which then took the money to pay their debt and (in theory) give them any remaining money. But, of course, no money ever remained, and the arrangement essentially led to perpetual servitude.
One day, a bus driver came by the plantation trying to round up people to attend a political rally in the city of Matanzas. The driver offered anyone who came with him five dollars and a sandwich. To my grandfather, that sounded pretty good. He got on that bus, never to return to the plantation. My grandfather managed to get a job working at a fruit stand on the beach near Matanzas. Since he was broke, he was grateful that the owner let him sleep on the floor of the fruit stand.
He sent some of his salary back to his mother on the plantation, and in time, my grandfather was able to save a little money for himself as well. The owner of the fruit stand expanded, opening a restaurant across the street. And my grandfather took his meager savings and bought the fruit stand. Rafael Cruz became a small business owner . . . of a magnificent beachfront fruit stand.
Rafael soon married and had a son, but his first marriage didn’t last. He then met Laudelina Diaz, my grandmother. She lived with her parents, Juan and Lola Diaz, and her seven brothers and sisters, on a small ranch about a quarter mile down the road. She was eleven years younger than he and was a schoolteacher. Laudelina was blessed with a nearly photographic memory. She loved her sixth-grade students, and they felt the same way about her. Indeed, decades later, when she was retired and living in Texas, she would repeatedly be surprised to see former students from Cuba who had tracked her down to thank her for the loving care and inspiration she had given them. For five years, Rafael courted Laudelina, and then they wed.
Although he had only a third-grade education, Rafael’s business prospered at first, and he was able to grow the fruit stand into a proper grocery store. He decided to bring in his youngest brother to join him in running the store, but the young lad turned out to be more interested in women and liquor than in being a responsible business partner. Nor were matters helped by Rafael’s generosity. When a strike at a nearby textile factory left a substantial number of workers without income, Rafael offered credit at his store to all the factory workers. But few felt honor-bound to pay him back when the strike was over. The combination of his irresponsible brother and the mounting delinquent accounts forced Rafael to close the
grocery store.
Needing to find a new way to provide for his young family, Rafael became a commission salesman for RCA. One of his favorite sales methods was something called the “puppy dog close” (derived from the easiest way to sell a dog—letting a family simply try the puppy for a few days). When television came into Cuba, my grandfather would urge prospective customers to try out a TV for a little while, for free. At any point in time he had a couple of dozen TVs on loan to different people. He would run across you on the street and say, “There is a great boxing match on TV this Saturday,” or “Elvis Presley is going to be on a TV show next week,” followed by “Why don’t I lend you a TV so you and your family can watch it?” They would often reply, “But I don’t want to buy a TV,” to which my grandfather would respond, “Who is talking about buying? I have a half a dozen TVs and you can keep one for a couple of weeks. I’ll pick it up when I need it.” Then, after a couple of weeks, he would come by their house on Saturday morning . . . right in the middle of Saturday cartoons. He’d knock on the door, walk into the living room, and reach over and unplug the TV. Then he’d pick it up and begin walking out of the house.
Inevitably, the kids who had been watching cartoons would scream and cry, and the parents would be desperate to mollify their children. My grandfather sold a lot of TVs on Saturday mornings.
On March 22, 1939, Laudelina gave birth to her first child, Rafael Bienvenido Cruz. Bienvenido is Spanish for “welcome,” and true to his name, Dad was very much a welcome addition to the young couple’s home. A few years later, she had a second child, Sonia Lourdes. Sonia is a firebrand—my “Tía Loca”—whom I love and admire.
Growing up in Cuba in the 1940s could be challenging, but it was also wonderful. My dad loves the sea, and he spent countless hours at the beach, fishing with his father and a 44-pound-test monofilament line that they would hold directly in their hands. Even a small fish would cause the line to burn and cut your fingers as you let it slide between your finger and thumb while working the fish. My grandfather’s and father’s fish stories more often than not included showing the cuts on their fingers to demonstrate the ferocity of Cuban fish.