As part of his relentless campaign to win the Nobel War Prize, Trump revealed today that his next target is Cuba.

This is music to the ears of his Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.

Since he first ran for the United States Senate in Florida, Little Marco has made no secret of his hatred for the commie brigands despoiling the nation of his ancestors. What he has tried to keep secret, however, is an inconvenient truth about his own past. And honestly, I can’t blame him, because the truth is pretty darn embarrassing.

Rubio wasn’t given much of a shot when he launched his first bid for the Senate in 2009, but he had two things going for him. He was a darling of the Cro-Magnon MAGA mob known as the Tea Party, and he had a family narrative irresistible to Florida’s sizable Cuban voting bloc: his parents had fled Fidel Castro’s regime in 1959.

He repeated this credential multiple times during the campaign, and, after he was elected in 2010, his official Senate website reaffirmed that Mario and Oriales Rubio “came to America following Fidel Castro’s takeover.”

That part of his official bio remained online as late as October 2011, after which it was quietly deleted. Why? Because it was outed as Little Marco’s Big Lie.

In fact, his parents left Cuba three years earlier, in 1956, when it was ruled by the right-wing military dictator Fulgencio Batista. It would have been extremely challenging for them to flee Castro, since he wasn’t even in Cuba in 1956—he was hanging with Che Guevara in Mexico. Fidel wouldn’t take power in Cuba until... hey, what do you know, 1959!

Rubio’s convenient alteration of his parents’ departure date is striking for not just its opportunism but its stupidity—two hallmarks of his tenure as Secretary of State. What with naturalization records and all, the truth was bound to come out sooner or later—in Marco’s case, sooner. It would be like Pete Best trying to claim he drummed for the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964 when he was actually fired in 1962.

Of course, when it comes to historical accuracy, Rubio’s doltish boss is not exactly Robert Caro. In addition to asserting that the British deployed military aircraft in the eighteenth century, Donald Trump has indicated that Andrew Jackson, who died in 1845, was angry about the Civil War, and that Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895, is still alive.

But Little Marco’s Big Lie is particularly significant because he is now directing the United States to support exactly the kind of right-wing leaders in Latin America that his parents fled. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele and Chile’s José Antonio Kast, to name just two, would have sent Mario and Oriales Rubio scrambling for their Samsonites.

The jury’s still out on Kast, who takes office on Wednesday, but his resume isn’t encouraging. He is the first president in Chile’s democratic era to praise the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who executed, disappeared, and tortured tens of thousands during his 17-year reign of terror. You can tell a lot about a person by whom he admires—the late, great Hannibal Lecter comes to mind.

As for Bukele—who, in a flourish so cringe that it’s worthy of Elon Musk, calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator”—the jury is very much in. He is the proud proprietor of CECOT, the notoriously brutal prison whose detainees were used as a backdrop for a Rolex-wearing Kristi Noem during a photo op/war crime back in March. More recently, the mega-gulag was the subject of a “60 Minutes” expose that state media censorship czar—I mean CBS News chief—Bari Weiss axed at the last minute because it made her overlord, Donald Trump, appear torturer-adjacent.

I’m just sorry Frederick Douglass had to live to see all this.