by Ted Cruz
My father was also fooled by Castro, but only for a time, and only in his youth. Few people would go out of their way to atone for such a mistake, but he did, by denouncing his own public statements and asking for forgiveness. That must have been difficult, and it’s one of the many reasons I’ve always admired my dad’s character.
The importance of speaking the truth was one lesson my father learned from Castro’s rise to power; another was what a society that steadily erodes its citizens’ individual freedoms looks like. He’s seen it happen before.
Barack Obama, noting his own rise from humble beginnings, has observed that “in no other country on earth is my story even possible.” My family can relate to that sentiment. In no other country would Rafael Cruz’s story even be possible.
And yet, in many ways, his story is commonplace. All of us are the children of those who risked everything for liberty. It’s what ties Americans together. What has always been special about America—what has always been part of our national DNA—is a profound love of liberty and opportunity, an embrace of the unlimited potential of free men and free women.
But, as Reagan powerfully observed, “freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States when men were free.”
My dad is particularly emotional whenever this topic surfaces. The freedom of America was the dream that allowed him to endure the brutality of Cuba. It was and is a beacon of hope for all those who, like him, have endured oppression.
“We have to turn America around,” he says, his voice quivering. Thinking of the so many others who look to us for inspiration and hope, he continues, “When we faced oppression in Cuba, I had a place to flee to. If we lose our freedom here, where do we go?”
* In 1962, with a forged passport to escape Cuba, she fled to America to join her brother. My grandparents joined them eight years later.
CHAPTER 2
To the Lone Star State
Nearing seventy, the tall and imposing Texan was more weary and embattled than in the days of his splendid youth, but he still managed to carry himself with the dignity and pride that had sustained him as the founding father of the state he so cherished.
Sam Houston, elected to the governor’s chair by 56 percent of the people a little more than a year earlier, arrived at his office early. As was his custom, he was carrying his lunch basket, so he could work from his desk. There was little time for idleness. Texas was under siege, and as he told his political opponents, Houston intended to work for its salvation just as long as he was able.
Upon entering his office, however, he realized at once that the threats made against him hadn’t been idle. Another man was seated at his desk, in his chair. This was not Sam Houston’s office anymore.
The former president of the former Republic of Texas, the state’s first U.S. senator once it joined the Union, the once-popular governor of the Lone Star State, was now unemployed. Fired, to be exact. Thrown out of office by a Confederate convention that he refused to support or legitimize, whose power to speak for the people of Texas he would vociferously deny. Now Ed Clark, the Confederates’ appointed governor of Texas, and usurper of his office, was sitting in his chair.
“Well, Governor,” Houston said, his voice filled with sarcasm as he uttered the title, “I hope you will find it an easier chair than I have found it.”1
“I’ll endeavor to make it so,” Clark replied, “by conforming to the clearly expressed will of the people of Texas.”
The words cut into the proud Houston, who had vigorously opposed Texas’s decision to join the Confederate States of America in February 1861. For Houston, a slave owner who nonetheless bore no love for the abhorrent institution and opposed its expansion, the American republic mattered more than any grievance nursed by his southern neighbors.
“Upward of forty-seven years ago, I enlisted, a mere boy, to sustain the national flag and in defense of a harassed frontier, now the abode of a dense civilization,” he had said in a speech a few months earlier. “When, in 1836, I volunteered to aid in transplanting American liberty to this soil, it was with the belief that the Constitution and the Union were to be perpetual blessings on the human race—that the success of the experiment of our fathers was beyond dispute, and that whether under the banner of the Lone Star or the many-starred banner of the Union, I could point to the land of Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson, as the land blest beyond all other lands, where freedom would be eternal and Union unbroken.” He had implored Texans not to trade the Union “for all the hazards, anarchy and carnage” of civil war—“a leap in the dark—a leap into an abyss, whose horrors would even fright the mad spirits of disunion who tempt you on.”
It was to no avail. For Confederates, the final straw had come when Houston refused to swear an oath to the Confederacy—the only southern governor to so refuse. There were many other Texans who did not share the Confederates’ views about the war, or about their leader. Some urged Houston to fight on: “Save Texas for us if you can.”
But he knew the cause was lost. Too many Texans had already decided to take that plunge into chaos. Houston could not bear to watch with his own eyes what would happen to his beloved Texas. So he and his wife decided to leave the state they loved.
All along his route to Alabama, the deposed governor was greeted by his fellow Texans. Some made death threats; others hailed his name, and urged him to speak.
In April 1861, as the bombardment of South Carolina’s Fort Sumter began and the war Houston long had feared got under way, he found himself back in Galveston, Texas. Word of his arrival spread, and a large and angry crowd of Confederates, believing Houston a traitor, gathered outside the balcony of his hotel. In fear of Houston’s life, friends urged Houston not to speak to them. But Houston was never one to run from conflict, or hide from the truth.
Instead, he offered a famous warning. “Some of you laugh to scorn the idea of bloodshed as the result of secession,” he said. “But let me tell you what is coming. Your fathers and husbands, your sons and brothers, will be herded at the point of a bayonet. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives you may win southern independence, but I doubt it. The North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche.”
His speech was met with jeers and catcalls. Sam Houston had helped build the state of Texas, and now he was branded a traitor. He would die two years later, in July 1863, penniless and thought to be disgraced, unable to bear witness as his warnings of disaster for the Confederacy proved themselves prescient. Only a handful of Texans attended his funeral. His tombstone reads: “A Brave Soldier. A Fearless Statesman. A Great Orator—A Pure Patriot. A Faithful Friend, A Loyal Citizen. A Devoted Husband and Father. A Consistent Christian—An Honest Man.”
If my dad has been a hero to me, my mother has been a best friend for as long as I can remember. Eleanor Darragh is a woman of unconditional love and deep compassion, but also of formidable intellect and unshakable strength. These qualities she often deployed against some pretty tough odds.
Her parents were Irish and Italian. In the late 1800s, my grandmother’s father, Dominic Ciccini, came to America from Naples, Italy, as a teenager. In the melting pot of nineteenth-century America Italian and Irish immigrants often intertwined, and so it was with my family. Dominic fell in love with and married Mary Lunergen, who had been a teenage immigrant from County Tipperary in Ireland. After a few years, for reasons lost in family lore, Dominic changed their family name from Ciccini to the more Americanized Cekine, pronounced “See-kine.”
Dominic and Mary began having ch
ildren, and on April 10, 1912, my grandmother, Elizabeth Eleanor Cekine, was born in Wilmington, Delaware. By the time Elizabeth arrived, the house was full of kids—she was the second youngest of seventeen children (ten of who survived to adulthood). It was your typical Irish-Italian family, loud, boisterous, working class. Indeed, we sometimes joked that there were only two families in Delaware: the DuPonts, who owned the factories, and my family, who worked in them.
Not everyone in Mom’s family worked a blue-collar job; some wound up on a shadier side of the law. My mother’s uncle John and uncle Albert both ran numbers, with Albert heading up the numbers racket in Wilmington. And Mary, the matriarch, developed a surefire way of carrying the numbers without being stopped by the police: She would conceal them between two soup pots, nested together, as she walked down the street.
At the age of nineteen, young Elizabeth married Edward John Darragh, also of Irish descent.
Edward’s parents were from Chester, Pennsylvania, and his father had enjoyed some modest success as a small business owner, running a brewery and bar. But, when Edward was twelve, his father died unexpectedly, and so he dropped out of school after the eighth grade. Thus, at the age of twelve, my grandfather went to work full-time as a clerk with the Reading Railroad (yes, the same one that’s on the Monopoly board).
Together, Edward and Elizabeth had three children. The eldest, my mom, was born in 1934. My mother, Eleanor Elizabeth, is pretty, five foot two with brown hair, fair skin, and dark brown eyes. Shy and unusually bright, she excelled in school—something my grandfather thought superfluous for a girl in the 1940s.
Her father was not an easy man. Edward was gruff, opinionated, and often selfish. He drank too much. (Years later, Eddie, my uncle, was such an extreme alcoholic that he lived with his parents his entire adult life, could not work, and died from the ravages of his drinking.) And when my grandfather was drunk, he was a mean drunk. As the eldest, my mom bore the brunt of that.
When my mother was in high school, my grandfather went to work as a traffic manager in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where my mom went to a Catholic all-girls’ school, St. Joseph’s Academy. She worked hard and graduated near the top of her class. A few years later, my grandfather was transferred to Houston, and after high school graduation my mother joined her parents there.
My mom decided to apply to the Rice Institute (today it’s Rice University, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the country), which was all of two miles down the road. Much to the astonishment of my grandfather, she got in. Nobody in her family had ever gone to college, and my grandfather certainly didn’t think his daughter should be the first. His view—which he would express in a drunken, verbally abusive rage—was that there was no need for women to be educated.
But my mother’s shyness can be tempered by her strong will. Her Irish tends to come up whenever she sees injustice. So she battled her father. She was going to go to college, she declared, and there was not a thing he could do to stop her.
If she had needed his financial support, that would have been a problem. But the Rice Institute—founded in 1912 by the munificence of businessman William Marsh Rice—had such a substantial endowment that there was no tuition. Every student was on full scholarship. And so my mom could afford to go.
When she arrived at Rice in the fall of 1952, it was a difficult place. Only half of the student body was expected to graduate; roughly 50 percent of the students would flunk out. Moreover, she made her path even more difficult by choosing to major in math . . . almost unheard-of for women in the 1950s.
During college, she lived with her parents and worked summers at Foley’s, a Houston department store.
In 1956, Mom graduated from Rice with a degree in mathematics. She promptly went to work at Shell as a computer programmer—a career that hadn’t even existed just a few years before. Her father stubbornly thought she shouldn’t be working and living away from home, but she again insisted on going her own way. There were very few computer programmers who were women. The oil and gas industry was (and to some extent still is) dominated by men, as was the computer industry; at Shell, she was at the intersection of both.
One need not be a devotee of Mad Men to understand what faced working women in the 1950s. Coming out of college, my mom deliberately didn’t learn how to type. She understood that men would stop her in the corridors of the Shell offices and ask her, “Sweetheart, would you type this for me?” With a clear conscience she could answer, “I’d love to help, but I don’t know how to type! . . . I guess you’re just going to have to use me as a computer programmer instead.”
I often reflect on the challenges my mother confronted, especially whenever Democratic political operatives and their media allies spin the notion that Republican officeholders somehow have waged a “war on women.” It’s a made-up attack, poll-tested to try to scare single women into thinking that politicians want to take away their birth control. The attack is nonsense, designed to distract the voters. The alleged threat simply doesn’t exist. I’ve been around conservatives all my life, and I’ve never encountered a single person who wanted to ban birth control.*
The real war on women today can be found in the policies that have resulted in 3.7 million more women living in poverty under President Obama, and the median annual wage for women dropping $733 over the past six years. Women like my mom want—and deserve—the opportunity to work and excel in an environment that rewards merit, that pays them what they’re worth and allows them to develop their God-given talents and provide for their families. And they cannot do that in a stagnant economy, where small businesses are struggling and opportunity is scarce.
In 1956, my mom married her first husband, a mathematician named Alan Wilson. Two years later, they moved to Boston, where she was hired at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory as a programmer, tasked with calculating orbits of the Russian satellite Sputnik. It was pretty heady stuff for an Irish-Italian girl who was the first in her family to go to college.
In 1960, they moved to London, and five years later my mom gave birth to a son, named Michael. For my mother, 1965 was a year of celebration and tragedy. My mom loved Michael and rejoiced in motherhood, but that December she awoke one cold morning to find that he had died in his sleep.
Losing Michael to crib death broke my mother’s heart, and had a profound effect on her, so much so that I never even knew that I had had a brother until I was a teenager, when my mom finally told me the story. I have to admit, it was pretty surprising, disconcerting even, to be in high school and discover you had a brother you never knew about. (When I was in elementary school, I repeatedly asked my mom to “please make me a brother”; since she was in her mid-forties, she didn’t oblige.)
To this day, my mom is pro-life at a deep, emotional level. Having lost her first child, she understands firsthand that every human life is a precious, unique gift from God. She cannot imagine—it literally makes her tremble—taking the life of an unborn child. What she would give to have Michael back. I so wish my mother didn’t have to endure that pain.
And the heartbreak also ended her marriage. In 1966, she and Alan divorced, and she moved to New Orleans, where she went to work for Geocom, a geophysical data processing company.
And at Geocom, she met a man named Rafael Cruz.
In my first conscious memory, I was causing trouble. I was in the grocery story as I put a kazoo to my mouth and blew it, repeatedly, loudly, and to the growing irritation of my mother, for whom an Irish-American temper is not just an ethnic stereotype.
She informed her two-year-old son that if I failed to stop the noise, there would be consequences, namely that she would take me out of the grocery store, drive me home, and give me the spanking I richly deserved. I blew the horn.
My mom stopped shopping, left her cart in the aisle, picked me up, and took me home. In the car, my very first memory is trying my very best to turn the hand of fate. To strike up a conversation with her. To tell a joke. Anything to talk my way out of the
punishment. But my mother bested me in determination. She also was a woman of her word. My spanking was forthcoming.
I was born on December 22, 1970, in Calgary, Alberta, a growing metropolis carved from the cusp of the Canadian Rockies. After meeting each other at Geocom in New Orleans, my parents had moved to Canada to continue working in the oil and gas industry. They formed their own seismic data processing company to help oil companies search for new reserves. They were both mathematicians and computer programmers, and together they wrote the proprietary software for their business. The name of the company was R. B. Cruz and Associates.
My parents were two strong-willed people struggling to earn a living in a field dependent on oil prices that could—and did—fluctuate dramatically. As a result and quite understandably, they had significant issues, all of which went way over the head of a toddler preoccupied with playing in the snow and learning to crawl and to walk. The only thing I do remember about my early years living in Canada was that it was cold, though I doubt that was the only explanation for my parents’ drinking.
Although my mom and dad had both been raised in nominally Christian homes, faith at that time was not real to either one of them. Neither one had a personal relationship with Jesus. My dad lived a fast life and was enjoying business success. When I was three he decided he no longer wanted to be married. And so he left my mother and me in December 1974.
