Ted Cruz’s office has responded with fury to a New York Times op-ed that essentially argued he isn’t Hispanic enough to really count as a Cuban-American.
Op-ed contributor Ann Louise Bardach, writing about the Republican response to President Obama’s attempts to renew relations with Cuba, dismissed the opinions of Cuban-American senators Cruz and Rubio:
Cruz communications director Amanda Carpenter fired off an indignant letter to the editor, saying, “Your decision to allow an Op-Ed writer to openly mock a person’s ethnicity — as Ann Louise Bardach did when she wrote that Senator Ted Cruz “has been called as Hispanic ‘as Tom Cruise’ ” — is saddening.”
“An Op-Ed writer is not the arbiter of a person’s race or ethnicity, and it is unfortunate that The New York Times would allow someone a platform to pretend so,” she concluded.
Carpenter slammed Bardach’s suggestion that, “if he disagrees with her, Mr. Cruz is not truly Cuban — despite his father’s having been imprisoned and tortured in Cuba, and coming to America penniless.”
