Another Campaign Untruth: Ted Cruz’s Father’s Story of Fighting for Castro

Ted Cruz and Rafael Cruz- two consummate liars and nutcases

It increasing seems that being a shameless liar is a prerequisite to being a Republican presidential nominee contestant.  Either the candidates themselves are telling the lies or close family members are providing the false story lines.  Candidly, as the Christofascists have risen in power within the GOP, the level of lying and demagoguery has directly increased.  Now, Ted Cruz finds himself under fire for his father's fraudulent lies that have been woven into Cruz's own fairy tale narrative.  The older Cruz - who in my opinion belongs in an insane asylum - has made claims of "fighting for freedom" in Cuba as a young man.  The trouble is that many of the details he used to embellish his story simply are not true.  The New York Times looks at the truth about the elder Cruz's made up narrative.  Here are excerpts:

Since he was a boy, Senator Ted Cruz has said, all he wanted to do was “fight for liberty” — a yearning that he says was first kindled when he heard his father’s tales of fighting as a rebel leader in Cuba in the 1950s, throwing firebombs, running guns and surviving torture.

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 party’s presidential nomination. 

But the family narrative that has provided such inspirational fire to Mr. Cruz’s speeches, debate performances and a recently published memoir is, his father’s Cuban contemporaries say, an embroidered one.

The elder Mr. Cruz, 76, recalls a vivid moment at a watershed 1956 battle in Santiago de Cuba, when he was with a hero of the revolution, Frank País, just hours before he was killed in combat.  In fact, Mr. País was killed seven months later and in a different place and manner.

In interviews, Rafael Cruz’s 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.

Leonor Arestuche, 79, a student leader in the ’50s whom the Castro government later hired to verify the supposed exploits of revolutionary veterans, said a term existed for people like Mr. Cruz — “ojalateros,” or wishful thinkers.   “People wishing and praying that Batista would fall,” she said, “but not doing much to act on it.”

There is no question that Rafael Cruz, who is now a pastor and his son’s most effective and popular campaign surrogate, was beaten in 1957 at the hands of agents for Fulgencio Batista, the Cuban dictator.

The reason Mr. Cruz was arrested, however, is less clear, and he has offered different explanations. In an interview alongside his son in March, Mr. Cruz said he had sought to recruit to the revolutionary cause someone who turned out to be an informant working for Batista’s regime. The 1959 account, though, did not mention any informant . . . . 

Mario Martínez, who Mr. Cruz confirmed was part of his small revolutionary cell, said he did not recall Mr. Cruz’s being apprehended for trying to recruit someone and said he believed that the cause of his old comrade’s detainment was possession of a revolver — one that Mr. Cruz had never used. 

[N]one of the Cuban historians, former comrades of Mr. Cruz in his hometown or veterans of the Santiago battle reached by The Times could corroborate his story. 

[V]eterans of the operation questioned Rafael Cruz’s account of his involvement.  Luís Clergé, who prides himself on knowing the names of the commandos he served with in the Nov. 30 operation, had no memory of Mr. Cruz.   Mr. Cruz’s name also drew blanks from Luís Solá Vila, a leader of the Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, a campus-based activist group in Santiago, and Luís Gálvez Taupier, a university leader who worked closely with the movement’s youth brigades, among others.

In his book “A Time for Truth,” published in June, Ted Cruz writes that the rebels who attacked the Santiago Police Headquarters met devastating resistance, and “All of the students were killed, as was their leader, Frank País.”

But of the scores of rebels who participated in the attack, only a few were killed, according to eyewitness accounts and historical documents.

It looks like Ben Carson is not the only GOP candidate challenged by truth and veracity.  Both Carson and Cruz are pushing narratives that play well with the idiots and Christofascists of the GOP regardless of whether or not they bear any semblance to reality.  Among most normal and honest people, this amounts to lying.  Deliberately lying.