Cruz was born on December 22, 1970 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada where his parents, Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson Darragh and Rafael Bienvenido Cruz, were working in the oil business. His parents owned a seismic-data processing firm for oil drillers. Cruz's father, who was born in 1939 in Matanzas, Cuba, as Robert T. Garrett of the Dallas Morning News has described, "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 in 1957 at the age of 18, landing in Austin, becoming a Cuban �migr�, to study at the University of Texas, knowing no English and with $100 sewn into his underwear. 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 today 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 Irish and 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 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.
