by Ted Cruz
One time, my father and a friend decided to go fishing for a shark. The two boys got in a wooden rowboat, brought some rope with a chain leader, put a hunk of tuna on a large hook, and tossed it into the bright blue water. Sure enough, they ended up catching a shark, about six feet long. The shark was none too happy, and he charged their boat (itself only about ten feet long). The shark’s head rammed the boat and broke a hole its bottom, which resulted in water flooding the boat. The boys panicked. They cut the rope, and one boy began bailing water while the other rowed as fast as he could.
The boat sank a few hundred feet from shore, and the boys swam and towed the boat to the beach, terrified that an angry shark was behind them looking for retribution. Thankfully, the shark had other priorities, and they emerged unscathed.
But life in Cuba during those years wasn’t just about fishing adventures. Revolution was in the air.
Fulgencio Batista, a former Cuban army sergeant, led his first military coup in 1933, when he overthrew the democratically elected president of Cuba. Exiled in 1944, he returned and staged another coup in 1952. Firmly ensconced in power, Batista became a brutal dictator. With the military as his enforcers, Batista behaved like a mafioso, extorting protection money from local businesses. He showered privileges on a crony class in Havana and imprisoned and tortured those who crossed him. And the mafia comparison was not just figurative: Batista embraced American mobsters from Chicago and Las Vegas, and soon prostitution, drug traffic, and casinos proliferated.
In the Godfather movies, Michael Corleone flourished in Cuba; in real life, Batista used his mob profits to enrich himself and to buy a formidable arsenal, which he used to instill fear and impose order. Oppression breeds resistance, and the Cuban rebels were led by a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro.
Castro first burst onto the scene on July 26, 1953, when, as a young lawyer, he led a small band of armed men in an attack on the Moncada army garrison in the city of Santiago, on the southeastern coast of Cuba. Most of those men were killed, but Castro and a few others were captured and imprisoned. After being convicted, he was sent into exile in Mexico.
In protest, student demonstrations erupted all over the island. Batista’s army broke up the demonstrations by beating the students with billy clubs.
In the United States, student councils typically focus on student life, planning proms, and promoting school spirit; that certainly was our emphasis when I was on the student council in high school. It was not exactly the province of the “cool kids,” and few American student council leaders would be confused with revolutionaries.
In Cuba, the demonstrations—and ultimately the revolution—were in many ways led by high school and college student councils. At first the demonstrations were uncoordinated, but as the abuses of the Batista regime increased, they became larger and better organized. Eventually the opposition developed into a full-fledged underground movement, carrying out sabotage, propaganda, and attacks on political leaders.
At the time, none of the young men who joined the resistance knew that Castro was a communist. Castro was seen as a freedom fighter, an inspiring figure to Cuba’s restive youth, or, as my Dad puts it today, “fourteen-year-old boys who didn’t know any better.”
The anti-Batista underground consisted of a series of units operating in a semi-independent manner from one another. Secrecy was paramount, and after an initial period of training, my father—a high school student council leader—began recruiting others and forming his first unit. For reasons of security, the members of his unit did not know to whom my father reported. Their unit concentrated on propaganda, acquisition and movement of weapons, and acts of sabotage.
In September 1956, my dad enrolled at the University of Santiago and reported to Frank Pais, the provincial leader of the 26th of July Movement (named for the date of Castro’s first failed attack). Soon they began preparing for Fidel Castro’s imminent landing in Cuba with a group of eighty-two rebels; Castro and his group were traveling from Mexico on a sixty-foot cabin cruiser, the Granma. On the evening of November 29, Pais and his men were given final instructions and divided into two groups. The group my father was in was to join Castro and his rebels as he again stormed the Moncada army garrison the next morning. Frank Pais led the second group, which was to attack the police headquarters in Santiago at the same time.
As morning arrived, word came to my father’s group that for some reason the landing had not occurred and they were to scatter as quickly as possible. Later, they would learn that engine trouble had delayed the Granma. Their group dispersed. But the other group, apparently, did not get word.
The second group of rebels instead carried out their planned attack on the police headquarters, where they encountered fierce resistance. All of the students were killed, as was their leader, Frank Pais.
Two days later, on December 2, Castro and the Granma landed in Cuba. But by that time the army was on high alert and Castro had no choice but to head for the mountains. Of the eighty-two revolutionaries traveling with Castro, only nineteen reached the sierra. The rest were either killed or captured.
With the army rounding up rebels everywhere, my father and three of his friends decided to flee Santiago by car. On their way out of the city, however, they were stopped by an army patrol and captured. The soldiers took them to the Moncada garrison. Finally and ironically they would make it into the garrison they had planned to storm.
As they were taken off the army truck, my father could hear someone say under his breath, “What a shame, they look so young.” As my father and his men entered the garrison, soldiers jeered and yelled at them. “¡Al paredón! ¡Al paredón!” (To the firing squad, to the firing squad.)
My father thought that was the end. He resigned himself to death. “After all,” he thought to himself, “we’re young. We don’t have a family. No one depends on us. What does it matter if we lose our lives for freedom?”
But, thankfully, the Lord had a different plan for him. As they were marched into Moncada army garrison, they spotted a fellow student from the university who was the son of an army major. Together they cried out his name, “Erasmo, Erasmo!” It turned out he had been picked up by mistake and was just being released.
Erasmo walked over and asked what was happening. My father and his friends said they didn’t know why the army had taken them. They asked for his help. Erasmo had no idea that they were in the underground. He vouched for all four and they were released.
Were it not for that chance encounter, that providential intervention, my father likely would have been executed that afternoon. Instead, he returned to Matanzas and resumed control of his rebel unit. He formed a second one, focused on sabotage throughout the province, especially trying to disrupt communications and transportation.
For the young revolutionary, one of the greatest challenges was knowing whom to trust. Recruit the wrong person, trust the wrong person, and the results were fatal.
He worked hard to recruit a young man who seemed eager to join the revolution. Too eager, it turned out. The man was a government informant.
By the time he was seventeen, my dad had been fighting for several years. Then, one day, he disappeared.
My grandfather knew that his son was in the underground. And he knew that his disappearance was a very bad thing. So he began to search for him.
He went from jail to jail, eventually finding my father in an army garrison in Matanzas. It wasn’t pretty. The informant had turned him in. They threw him in a rotten cell, acrid with the smell of blood, grime, and urine. Men with clubs beat him. His captors broke his nose when they kicked him in the head with their army boots. They bashed in his front teeth until they dangled from his mouth. In each round of beatings, the pain was unbearable. Then it subsided altogether because the pain had completely numbed him. He often couldn’t feel his hands or his legs.
My father rarely talked about what happened to him, but years later, when I was a teenager, he and I went to see the movie Rambo. There�
��s a harrowing scene in that movie where Rambo is tied to some metal bedsprings and his Vietnamese captors torture him with electricity. That night, my parents had some friends over for dinner, and I remember my dad talking about the movie he and I had seen that afternoon. He said, “You know, the Cubans weren’t nearly that fancy in their torture methods. They would just come into your jail cell every couple of hours and beat the crap out of you. And then they’d do it again and again.”
Throughout the ordeal, my dad refused to tell his interrogators who else was in the underground. He had heard of too many rebels who had broken and had been shot, with their bodies dumped in the street. That fear kept him from breaking.
He was then dragged into the office of a colonel.
“We’re letting you go,” he said to Dad. “But if another bomb explodes in this city, we’re coming to get you.”
“Well, how can I be responsible for what other people do?” my father asked.
“I don’t care,” the colonel said. “I’m coming to get you.”
My dad was released so they could follow him. He was put under constant surveillance in the hope that he would lead them to other revolutionaries.
When he came home, my grandfather was adamant. “They know who you are now,” he told his son, with fear in his eyes. “It’s only a matter of time before they kill you. You’ve got to get out.”
Shortly thereafter, a woman from the Castro underground visited his house surreptitiously. She said he was under twenty-four-hour surveillance, the army was watching him, and it was too dangerous for other rebels to be seen with him. My dad asked if he could join Castro in the mountains and keep fighting, but he was told there was no way to get to the rebels.
And so my dad decided to flee Cuba. He had been a good student in high school, graduating first in his class. So in 1957, he applied for admission to three American universities: the University of Miami, Louisiana State University, and the University of Texas. Texas was the first to let him in, which set our family’s roots in the vast and opportunity-rich Lone Star State. With the letter of acceptance from Texas in hand, he went to the U.S. embassy and received a student visa. All he needed now was an exit permit from the Cuban government. That was not easy to get, especially for a young man who had been arrested as a rebel. Fortunately, the Batista regime was nothing if not corrupt. A lawyer friend of the family quietly bribed a Cuban government official, who stamped my father’s passport to let him out.
Early one morning in August 1957, my dad lay on the backseat of his father’s car inside their garage. My grandfather pulled the car out of the garage and drove to Havana, to the docks in the harbor. As my father prepared to leave, he was scared. His mother and sister cried and embraced him. He was leaving behind everything and everyone he knew. But there was only one place my father wanted to go.
As the ferryboat traversed the ninety miles between Cuba and America, my father pondered the life he had left behind. With the smell of salt water in the air, the smell he had grown up with every day, he thought of his friends, his parents, and his kid sister. He didn’t know if he would ever see any of them again.
Across those choppy seas, where so many Cubans have lost their lives trying to escape to freedom, powerful emotions gripped my dad. He felt profound guilt at having left the revolution, having left his comrades in arms. He felt sadness and uncertainty as to what was to befall his beloved Cuba. He was afraid, deeply afraid, as to how he would survive in a new country where he was almost totally alone. And yet he was excited. He was headed to America.
It is difficult for many of us to fully comprehend what a beacon of hope this country offers the rest of the world. There is no other place on earth that would have welcomed so freely to its shores a man like Rafael Cruz. He was eighteen, penniless, and spoke no English. He owned three things: the suit on his back, a slide rule in his pocket, and a hundred dollars that my grandmother had sewn into his underwear.
America, quite simply, saved my father. America gave him a chance.
After his ferry arrived in Key West, my dad then boarded a Greyhound bus for Austin, Texas.
He found a place to live, and got a job washing dishes in an Austin diner called the Toddle House. The job paid fifty cents an hour, but it was perfect because it didn’t require him to speak English. The best part about working at the restaurant, however, was that employees were allowed to eat for free on the job, which was a pretty good deal for an impoverished student. Indeed, he rarely ate anything unless he was on the job. Since he liked to eat seven days a week, he began working seven days a week as well.
At the same time, he went to school full-time. That presented an urgent challenge: learning English. All of his classes were in English, and he didn’t know the language. And if he flunked out of the university, he’d lose his student visa and have to go back to Cuba.
So he signed up for Spanish 101. While the professor was teaching Spanish (“leche means milk”), my dad did his best to reverse-engineer the class (“milk means leche”). To boost his grades, he took lots of math classes, since those were less language dependent. And he spent what little money he had going to the movies—a lot. Every Saturday he’d stay in the theater and watch the same movie three times in a row. The human brain is remarkable. By the third time, simply from context and intonation, he’d begin understanding parts of what was going on. And, quite quickly, he began learning English.
After my father learned English, he began going around to Rotary Clubs in Austin, speaking about the Cuban revolution. My father is a passionate and powerful speaker, and even in broken English, he would urge Austin businesspeople to oppose Batista and support the revolution and its leader, Fidel Castro.
In 1959, while he was in Austin, the revolution succeeded. Castro seized power and declared to the world that he was a communist. That summer, my dad returned to Cuba thinking he was finally free to visit his family, but he was horrified by what he saw. It quickly became evident that Castro was even worse than Batista had been. My father’s former hero began seizing people’s land and publicly executing dissidents. Nothing could be further from my father’s ideals than the tyranny of communism.
Indeed, as Castro’s brutality became apparent, my dad’s kid sister Sonia followed her brother’s path. But she became part of the counterrevolutionary struggle. She fought against Castro, trying to topple him from power. She engaged in sabotage, lighting the lucrative sugarcane fields on fire. Sonia and the rebels fled to the hills, living for months in caves and under the stars
And, sadly, she too faced prison and torture. Castro’s goons threw Sonia and her two best friends in prison—all of them were teenage girls—and brutalized them. I love my Tía Sonia—she’s a wonderful, passionate, loving person—and we don’t talk about what she experienced in that Cuban jail.*
Once Castro became dictator, he put in place an Orwellian regime of systematic oppression. For the state to be supreme, all other loyalties had to be destroyed—from family to religion. Children were taught to spy on their parents and to report anything they said that was disloyal to Castro. Churches were closed, and faith was aggressively persecuted. My grandmother told a story of Castro’s soldiers coming into classrooms carrying machine guns. They told the kids to close their eyes and pray to Jesus for some candy. The children did so, and no candy appeared. Then they told the kids to pray to Castro for candy; while their eyes were closed, the soldiers quietly put candy on each child’s desk.
Schoolteachers were required to indoctrinate their students with communism. But my grandmother wanted nothing to do with poisoning children’s minds, and so she resorted to an extreme measure: She feigned insanity. She began screaming gibberish and foaming at the mouth, running out of her classroom. She enlisted a doctor friend to give her a bogus diagnosis of insanity to get her out of teaching school. It always amazed me that my grandmother was willing to endure the stigma and ridicule of being thought crazy rather than be complicit in corrupting young children.
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k in Austin, my father sat down and made a list of every place he had spoken in support of Castro’s revolution. He made a point of going back to each and every one of them, standing before them, and apologizing. He would say, “I misled you. I didn’t do so knowingly, but I did so nonetheless. And for that, I am sorry.”
I always admired that about my father. Many people were horribly wrong about Fidel Castro, and many still are today. This is especially true among the fashionable circle of liberals who have decided to make Castro a sort of socialist folk hero. Leftist members of Congress have toured Cuba and come back raving about Castro and the wonders of his communist system. And of course Hollywood celebrities who have based their political philosophy on the idea that the American government is the world’s villain chime in with this chorus.
During the Cold War, there was a term for people who were manipulated and duped by a dictatorship so they could spread propaganda about it to the rest of the world—“useful idiots.” In Cuba, Americans welcomed into the country are carefully monitored by the regime. A taxi driver, for example, might pick someone up at the airport in Havana and offer to take them anywhere they want to go. If the visitor says, “I want to see a typical Cuban farm,” the driver might reply, “Sure. I will take you to one.” The taxi will go to a beautiful farm filled with livestock, food, and happy Cubans, all of whom extol the Castro government and express sadness that Americans have such a false view of the communist system. What many visitors don’t realize is that this taxi driver was not some random Cuban and this farm was not picked by chance. Everyone they are meeting is an agent of the state. The same is true about hospitals that filmmakers are allowed to “spontaneously” visit; they look top of the line and the quality of care seems excellent. But this too is a ruse. The state-run health care is a two-tiered system: one for corrupt party officials, for whom no expense is spared, and the other for everyone else. Nothing happens in Cuba, as in any dictatorship, without the close, watchful eye of the state, even if that eye is hidden to oblivious visitors who want to believe Castro is a hero and America is a bully.