On today’s “Wallbuilders Live” radio program, right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton and his co-host Rick Green criticized the statement released by the White House on the death of Fidel Castro for supposedly being too laudatory and suggested that they should bring Rafael Cruz, the father of Sen. Ted Cruz, who fled Cuba as a teenager, on to a future show to set the record straight about Castro’s record because he supposedly lived through it.
Barton and Green praised the statement issued by President-elect Donald Trump, saying that his statement was “very much in line with consistent history as somebody who actually knows the history of Cuba and knowing the history of the United States,” unlike President Obama’s statement, which just repeated that “pablum that professors and so many school teachers put out now.”
“We might ought to get our friend, Rafael Cruz, Ted’s dad, on the program again,” Green said. “This would be a good time to get a reminder of what he lived through there and the real difference between communism and our American form of freedom.”
Barton thought that was a great idea because Cruz “was there when Castro came to power” and so he could really set the record straight.
Barton and Green, of course, are both wrong, as Cruz did not “live through” Castro’s dictatorship but was rather a fighter as part of Castro’s revolution who was jailed by the Batista regime and fled the country a year before Castro took power:
Texas U.S. Senate hopeful Ted Cruz often ends his speeches with a story about how his father fled Cuban oppression.
But what the stumping GOP Senate candidate hadn’t clarified, until asked by The Dallas Morning News this week, was that his father departed for the U.S. in 1957, more than a year before Fidel Castro came to power.
…
Cruz, though, has remained silent as journalists and political activists incorrectly placed his father among the many Cubans who left the island nation after Castro took power, rather than as someone who fought on the same side as Castro to topple a rightist dictator, though he departed for Texas before the revolution succeeded.
