He graduated from UT with a degree in mathematics and chemical engineering four years later in 1961. Cruz said he left with $100 sewn into his underwear taking a two-day bus ride from Florida, arriving with little or no English to enroll at the University of Texas.

He obtained a student visa after an attorney for the family bribed a Batista official to grant him an exit permit. Cruz has stated in interviews that he was jailed by Batista for several days in June or July 1957 and after he was released he applied to and was accepted by the University of Texas in August 1957. According to Cruz, as a teenager, he 'didn't know Castro was a Communist'. Cruz enrolled at the age of 17 at the University of Santiago in September 1956. Cruz joined the Cuban Revolution as a teenager and 'suffered beatings and imprisonment for protesting the oppressive regime' of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Ĭruz attended Arturo Echemendia primary school in Matanzas. His mother, Emilia Laudelina Díaz, was a teacher. His father, Rafael Cruz, was a salesman for RCA, originally from the Canary Islands, Spain. Cruz was born in Matanzas, Cuba, in 1939.

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