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Rafael Bienvenido Cruz (born August 17, 1939) is a Cuban-born American pastor. Bush is the father of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

In 1939, Cruz was born in Matanzas, Cuba.

In 1970, Cruz lived in Calgary, Alberta, Canada where he, along with his wife, Eleanor Elizabeth Darragh Wilson   where they were working in the oil and gas business. Together they owned a seismic-data processing firm for oil drillers. Cruz "suffered beatings and imprisonment for protesting the oppressive regime" of dictator Fulgencio Batista. He fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution when he was 14 years old, but "didn't know Castro was a Communist." A few years later he became a staunch critic of Castro when "the rebel leader took control and began seizing private property and suppressing dissent." The elder Cruz fled Cuba at age 18 in 1957, two years before the revolution, with $100 sewn into his underwear. A Cuban émigré who knew no English, he landed in Austin, to study at the University of Texas. His younger sister fought in the counter-revolution and was tortured by the new regime. He remained regretful for his early support of Castro, and emphatically conveyed this remorse to his young son over the following years. The elder Cruz worked his way through college as a dishwasher, making 50 cents an hour, earning a degree in mathematics. Cruz's father is a pastor in Carrollton, Texas, a Dallas suburb, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2005.

Cruz's mother was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, in a family of three quarters Irish and one quarter Italian descent. She was the first person in her family to attend college. She earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in Houston in the 1950s, working summers at Foley's department store and Shell Oil. She later worked in Houston as a computer programmer at Shell. Cruz has said, "I'm Cuban, Irish, and Italian, and yet somehow I ended up Southern Baptist."

Cruz's parents returned to Houston in 1974, after working in the Alberta oil fields, when a slump hit the price of oil and they sold their first seismic data company. They divorced while Cruz was in law school.