Cuban Peers Dispute Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/us/politics/cuban-peers-dispute-ted-cruzs-fathers-story-of-fighting-for-castro.html?_r=0
Those stories, retold by Mr. Cruz and by his father, Rafael, have hooked Republican audiences and given emotional power to the message that the Texas senator is pushing as a contender for the partys presidential nomination. In their telling, the fathers experience in Cuba when the country was swept up by the charismatic young Fidel Castro, only to see him become a repressive Communist dictator becomes a parable for the sons nightmarish vision of government overreach under President Obama.
But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruzs speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his fathers Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.
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In interviews, Rafael Cruzs former comrades and friends disputed his description of his role in the Cuban resistance. He was a teenager who wrote on walls and marched in the streets, they said not a rebel leader running guns or blowing up buildings.