Ted Cruz

Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth (née Darragh) Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Cruz's mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s. Cruz's father, Rafael, was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary Islander who immigrated to Cuba as a child. As a teenager in the 1950s, Rafael Cruz was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005. At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz's parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling. Cruz has said that he is the son of "two mathematicians/computer programmers". In 1974, Cruz's father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz's parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father's first marriage. Miriam died in 2011 from a drug overdose. Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.