Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) took to the opinion pages of Politico in order to combat allegations by the Washington Post that he had embellished the story of how his parents emigrated from Cuba. Rubio had previously said that his parents left the nation in 1958 or 1959 in order to escape Castro. In reality, his parents left the island nation before Castro took power.
“My understanding of my parents’ journey has always been based on what they told me about events that took place more than 50 years ago — more than a decade before I was born,” Rubio said. “What they described was not a timeline, or specific dates.”
He lashed out against the paper, writing: “to call into question the central and defining event of my parents’ young lives – the fact that a brutal communist dictator took control of their homeland and they were never able to return – is something I will not tolerate.”
