Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, in Calgary, Alberta, to parents Eleanor Elizabeth Darragh Wilson and Rafael Bienvenido Cruz. At the time of his birth, Cruz' parents were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling.ruz's mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware, of three quarter Irish and one quarter Italian ancestry. His father left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2005. His mother earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.