Hello, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Brace Beldon.

And I'm producer Young Jomsky.

And welcome to the True and on podcast. We are recording from my husband's hotel room.

He got quite uncomfortable when I said to the desk clerk that we were married, but it didn't bother me at all.

Running, I think, on very little sleep, but we just got back from the island of Cuba,

90 miles south of the greatest city in the world, Key West.

And there's a few things that we want to talk about.

We're going on kind of a long journey over not just today and tomorrow, but this next week.

So just to get some things out of the way, some context, I guess.

Just weeks after the kidnapping of Venezuelan president, Nicholas Maduro, where he was taken by U.S. Special Forces

out of Caracas and into New York, where he's being put on trial on a host of rather flimsy

charges. On January 26th, 2026, Trump issued an executive order titled Addressing Threats to the United States by the Government of Cuba, which may strike many listeners as odd because I cannot recall recently, and I'm an avid reader of the news, the government of Cuba making a lot of threats towards the United States.

So it reads, it's long, but in part, I'm going to read part of it.

The government of Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United

States.

The regime aligns itself with and provides support for numerous hostile countries, transnational

terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the government

of the Russian Federation, Russia,

the People's Republic of China, PRC, the government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah.

For example, Cuba blatantly hosts dangerous adversaries in the United States, inviting them

to base sophisticated military intelligence capabilities in Cuba that directly threaten the national security of the United States.

Cuba hosts Russia's largest overseas signals intelligence facility, which tries to steal sensitive national security information of the United States.

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