MAGA War: Marco Rubio LIES to Trump about Fake Cuba Talks
Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Maté
Useful Idiots, LLC
4.5 • 4.6K Ratings
🗓️ 13 February 2026
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Click here for the full interview with Jose Luis Granados Ceja: https://open.substack.com/pub/usefulidiots/p/full-interview-maga-war-marco-rubio?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Watch this week's Friday Free-For-All: John Fetterman and Claude AI Each Just Threatened to Kill People https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/what-do-john-fetterman-and-ai-have?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Join us LIVE on Youtube every Monday at 10am EST for Monday Mourning, where we watch the Sunday morning news shows so that you don't have to.
This week we’re looking at the intensification of the decades-old US blockade of Cuba. Trump has imposed an even harsher blockade, blocking fuel to the country, leading to an even more dire humanitarian crisis.
Just this week, a report showed that US sanctions are now reportedly killing children with cancer: “Amid worsening shortages, Cuba's rate of childhood cancer survival has fallen by 15% — from roughly 80% to 65% — according to data from Cuba’s Health Ministry.”
And this isn’t just collateral damage of US policy: kids with cancer are the targets of the murderous US sanctions, which are aimed to harm the most vulnerable in a society.
Joining us to talk about these sanctions and the history of US-Cuba relations is journalist José Luis Granados Ceja.
Useful Idiots: For DropSite News, you cowrote the article: Marco Rubio Is Deliberately Blocking Trump From Cuba Talks. Can you tell us what you discovered?
José Luis Granados Ceja: What we found was that these claims that Trump was making loudly to media outlets: that they are in talks with Cuba and that they’re thinking about a deal, don’t line up with what we were hearing from people both in the U.S. and in Cuba.
We were able to ascertain that these claims of secret negotiations happening in Mexico were also not true. And a source was able to confirm that the official in Mexico City from the Secretary of Foreign Relations was not actually involved at all.
So when you put all those pieces together, it very much looks like Marco Rubio is deliberately lying to Trump, that the State Department is not being forthcoming about what’s actually happening in terms of high-level negotiations between Cuba and the United States.
And our hypothesis here is that it’s about trying to lay the groundwork for more radical action.
Useful Idiots: Can you tell us how Marco Rubio’s history with Cuba might be driving this?
José Luis Granados Ceja: We have to remember, Marco Rubio is obsessed with overthrowing the Cuban revolution. Apparently in his own autobiography when he was positioning himself to be a candidate for president, he wrote that he used to dream about leading an army of exiles and installing himself as president of Cuba. He’s obsessed with this idea.
Obviously, he already had to concede when it comes to Venezuela. But I’m not sure that he’s willing to accept anything similar when it comes to Cuba. So he may be deliberately misleading Trump in order to say, ‘well, talks didn’t work, right? We were at the table. Nothing happened. Guess we’re going to have to invade or bomb or do something similar to what we did in Venezuela, or possibly more drastic.’
Subscribe for the full interview with José Luis where he reveals the new mafia state that Rubio wants to impose on Cuba (with himself as don), how a pan-American coalition could take on the US in Latin America, and whether recent US aggression in Cuba will push China to enter the conflict.
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Useful Idiots. I'm Katie Helper. |
| 0:07.8 | I'm Mary Mate. Thank you so much for being here. Our website is Useful Idiots Podcast.com. |
| 0:13.0 | Go there to support the show and get bonus content. This week we'll be looking at the intensification |
| 0:18.3 | of the decades-old U.S. blockade of Cuba. Trump has imposed an even |
| 0:24.6 | harsher blockade blocking fuel to the country leading to an even more dire humanitarian crisis. |
| 0:30.5 | Yes. And joining us to do that will be Jose Luis Granado Seja, who is a great journalist. |
| 0:35.5 | All right. Every week we do a recap of the week. |
| 0:38.2 | It's called the Friday Free For All. |
| 0:39.5 | It's only for our paid subscribers. |
| 0:41.2 | But here is a free preview. |
| 0:45.6 | The never-ending, always static, always the exact same thing, proxy war and Ukraine, |
| 0:53.0 | where basically you have uh russia making |
| 0:56.8 | these slow advances a lot of people dying on both sides there have been all these reports recently |
| 1:02.5 | of massive casualties on both the russian side and the ukrainian side i don't know the exact |
| 1:09.1 | toll but i just know a lot of people are being killed. |
| 1:11.1 | And this war is this month marking its fourth anniversary, so four years of this, and it's never |
| 1:19.5 | ending. And on the NATO side, the talking point is exactly the same. So here is the former |
| 1:25.3 | Secretary General of NATO, Anders Fogg Rasmussen, speaking to |
| 1:32.0 | Christian Amunpur of CNN. And I find it quite disappointing and embarrassing that we are not able to |
| 1:39.2 | put more pressure on Putin. The fact is, Putin has no incentive to engage in constructive peace negotiations |
| 1:47.4 | as long as he believes he can win on the battlefield. We have to change his calculus by putting |
| 1:54.0 | more pressure on him economically and militarily. |
... |
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