His white linen suit was stained red with blood. Blood that had been beaten out of him with a club, regularly each hour. Breaking his nose. Shattering his teeth. Scarlet red blood, as if his suit were emblazoned with the color of the Marxist revolution of which he was a part.
As my father lay on that prison floor, crumpled and broken, not a spot of white was visible on the now torn and tattered suit he had been given for his seventeenth birthday. Instead, mud and dirt and grime and blood.
To this day, my dad remembers what he was thinking in that dark hole: “Nobody depends on me. I have no wife, no children. It doesn’t matter if I live or I die.”
Three years earlier, when he was just fourteen, my father had made the fateful decision to join up with the revolution in his homeland of Cuba. To follow Fidel Castro. My dad was young and ignorant and naïve. Rafael Bienvenido Cruz didn’t know Castro was a communist. He didn’t know the horrors that would befall the Cuban people at the hands of his new comrades. He just knew that the then dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, was corrupt and cruel and oppressive. As Francis Ford Coppola immortally chronicled in the Godfather saga, Batista was in bed with the American mafia, enjoying wealth and power purchased with the blood beaten out of the Cuban people.
Born in Matanzas, a small Cuban town named for the brutal massacre carried out by the Spaniards more than four centuries earlier, my father grew up in an idyllic island paradise. My grandfather, my abuelo Rafael Cruz, had grown up as an indentured servant on a Cuban sugar plantation. In 1918, at eighteen, Rafael left the plantation, accepting the offer of five dollars and a sandwich to board a bus and go vote for a local politician. He slept on the floor of a fruit stand on the beach, where he got a job sweeping the floors. As the years passed, he became a salesman for RCA, the American company selling the new and miraculous inventions called televisions. Over time, he would become the top-producing RCA salesman in Cuba.
He met a fetching girl, Laudelina, who was eleven years his junior. She was a sixth-grade teacher, beloved by her students for her compassion and meticulous care in teaching them each day. Together, their first-born son was my father, who arrived in 1939.
My dad was an excellent student like his mother, with a natural gift for math. By the time he was fourteen, he had been elected to the student council and was a leader in his school. Years later, I too was on the student council. But we concerned ourselves with school dances and the food in the cafeteria. In Cuba, in the 1950s, the concerns of student council members were more fundamental: revolution. Fidel Castro, the charismatic revolutionary guerilla, had been a student council leader at the University of Havana. The children who followed him were, as my dad puts it, “fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys who didn’t know any better.”
Marxist revolutions have always begun with the children. Young and idealistic and passionate and oh-so-unaware of the vicious perils that await them, teenagers can easily be swept up in the currents of revolution.
My father joined up and began doing acts of sabotage—burning government buildings, throwing Molotov cocktails, whatever he could to undermine the oppressive regime.
That’s what had landed him in prison at seventeen. Batista’s police had caught him, and they were extracting their brutal revenge.
The next day he was dragged into the office of a colonel, who told him, “I’m letting you go. But if another bomb goes off, if another fire starts, I’m blaming you.”
“How can I be responsible for every bad thing that happens in the city?” my father asked.
“I don’t care,” replied the commandant. “I’m holding you responsible.”
When my father returned home, my abuela wept. Her eldest child had walked in the door beaten, covered in his own blood. As she told me when I was a child, that image from that day was seared into her mind forever.
My abuelo told him, “Get out of the country. They know who you are now. They’ll just hunt you down and kill you.”
Nevertheless, my father wanted to stay. His revolutionary comrades were preparing a military assault on the government, and he wanted to participate. But a young woman, a fellow guerilla, came by his house that night, slipping in unseen. She told him, “Stay away from the rest of us now. Batista’s police are following you. You’ll lead them to us.”
So he did. He applied to college in America. To the University of Miami, to LSU, and to the University of Texas. Texas was the first one that let him in. And that’s how I came to be a Texan.
In the summer of 1957, my eighteen-year-old father boarded a ferry boat to Key West. He watched his homeland recede and wondered if he would ever see his beloved Cuba again. When he landed, he bought a ticket on a Greyhound bus and began the lonely trek to Austin. When he arrived, he had nothing but one hundred dollars sewn into his underwear and a slide rule in his suit pocket. He knew no one, and he spoke no English.
He found a place to live—a boarding house that catered to impoverished students—and he got a job as a dishwasher, making fifty cents an hour.
Enrolled at UT, he began his freshman classes—all of which were in English. Since my dad couldn’t speak English, he sat at the back of the class wondering what his professors were saying. But, thankfully, he learned English quickly. My dad had an acute incentive to do so—if he didn’t, he would flunk out; if he flunked out, they would revoke his student visa; if they revoked his visa, they would send him back to Cuba; and if he went back to Cuba, the government would kill him.
So he signed up for Spanish 101 and reverse-engineered the course. When the professor said, “ ‘milk’ is ‘leche,’ ” my father wrote down, “ ‘leche’ is ‘milk.’ ” And he went to movies. All day on Saturday, he would go see the same movie over and over again. The human mind is marvelously intuitive, and after the third or fourth time in a row watching a movie, he would start to get a sense of what the actors were saying, and then to understand it.
Once he learned English, my dad began giving talks around Austin. He’d go to Rotary Clubs and other gatherings of businessmen in town, and he’d speak about the revolution. He’d sing the praises of Fidel Castro, describe the corruption and abuse of Batista, and urge Texans to support the guerillas.
Then the revolution succeeded. On December 31, 1958—New Year’s Eve—Batista fled Cuba, boarding a plane to escape certain death. And a triumphant Fidel Castro, with his ragtag band of revolutionaries—mostly children—entered the city of Havana.
For a moment, there was widespread celebration. Castro was seen by many as a liberator, and his victory was celebrated in many quarters in the United States. When Castro began naming fellow revolutionaries to his cabinet, Time magazine, one of the most influential publications in the United States at the time, reported that they were “mostly responsible, moderate men, ready to get to work.”1
But early hopes were quickly shattered. Now victorious, Castro declared to the world that he was a Marxist, a communist. And his revolution became a dictatorship.
Batista was bad. Very soon, it became clear to almost anyone watching that Castro was much, much worse.
He seized people’s lands. He seized their homes. He arrested any who dared to speak up, who dared to oppose him. His bloodthirsty lieutenant, Che Guevara, lined up dissidents before firing squads, executing hundreds. Anyone who resisted faced prison and torture and murder.
For me, Castro’s Marxist brutality was not abstract. It was personal.
As Cuba descended into vicious oppression, my father’s kid sister, my Tia Sonia, was still there, as were my grandparents. My Tia Sonia, whom I adore, is fiery and passionate and irrepressible. She was just a teenager, but she was horrified by what was happening.
And so she fought back.
Like her brother before her, she joined a revolution, this time the counter-revolution against the Castro regime. She, too, began committing acts of sabotage, burning sugar cane fields and working to topple the oppressive regime. And, like her brother before, she too was caught and imprisoned.
They threw my Tia Sonia in jail, and they did horrible, unspeakable things to her. Communist regimes are always evil and oppressive, but they reserve unique brutality for women. My Tia Sonia endured their worst.
In prison with her were my Tia Miriam and my Tia Mela. (In Spanish culture, you can have lots and lots of tias. They weren’t actually my blood relatives, but they were my Tia Sonia’s best friends, and so I grew up with them both, and they were my tias as well.) The three of them had been volleyball players together in high school, spirited athletes, and together they fought ferociously against Castro’s barbarity. My Tia Miriam was thrown in a hole—a cell that was just a couple feet wide—where she was left for days in darkness lying next to the rotting corpse of another prisoner they had already murdered.
In 1960, my father returned to Cuba, the only time he has ever been back. He saw first-hand the misery, the suffering, the poverty, the brutality. With his own eyes he observed the devastating reality that his former comrades—the Marxists who had filled the minds of idealistic teenage boys with grand promises of liberty and justice and equality—were in fact liars and murderers and tyrants. He saw the savage abuse his little sister had faced.
And he saw the crushing impact on his own mother. For decades, my abuela had taught sixth grade, and she loved her students. When Castro took over, one of the very first priorities of the revolutionaries was to target the youth, to indoctrinate the children. Abuela told me that, shortly after Castro took over, they sent soldiers into the elementary schools. The soldiers instructed the kindergartners to close their eyes and pray to God. To ask for candy. They did; they opened their eyes, and there was no candy. Then, they told the children to close their eyes and pray to Fidel Castro for candy. They did. And when they opened their eyes, each child had a piece of candy on his or her desk, quietly slipped there by the soldiers.
Marxism always begins that way. By destroying allegiance to anything other than the state, Dear Leader, El Comandante. Faith in God must be destroyed. Devotion to family must be destroyed. Children are taught to betray their parents, to report what they said at home if it differs from the views mandated by the government. Anything that might get in the way of complete and absolute loyalty and obedience to the revolution must be eradicated.
The communists demanded the same of my family. They ordered Abuela to begin teaching her children Marxism. And so she faced a choice. She could be complicit in poisoning the minds of her beloved students. Or she could refuse, and face prison or worse, be forcibly removed from her own family and subjected to who knew what horrors. She chose a third option. She feigned insanity. One day in class, she began foaming at the mouth, tearing out her hair, screaming and wailing like a madwoman. They removed her from class, and she escaped her dilemma. But the price she paid—willingly—was the stigma and scorn of her neighbors’ thinking she was a crazy lady.
My father returned from Cuba profoundly troubled and permanently changed. And then he did something I deeply admire. He sat down, and he made a list of every place he had spoken in Austin in support of Castro. Then he went back, to each and every one of them, and stood before the same people to make amends.
“I am here to apologize,” he told them. “I misled you. I didn’t do so knowingly, but I did so nonetheless. I urged you to support an evil man and an evil Marxist regime. And for that I’m truly sorry.”