If you need to thwack a symbol, you pick a country that can be dealt with as merely symbolic with few repercussions. Grenada is a better pick than the USSR. Cuba a better pick than Russia.
Moreover, conservatives tend to like rightist dictatorships more than leftist dictatorships. Liberals or progressives, the other way around. We each forgive our own and make excuses for those we consider "us"; we each exaggerate what our foes do and assume they do bad things for the worst possible reason--we both luvs us some attribution error. It took a lot to make DUers turn on the Bolivarian Revolution and Mugabe, and even some still distinguish between Chavez and Maduro like some distinguished between Lenin and Stalin. Some, on the other hand, have just gone quiet. We'll leave aside conversations I had with progressives in the '80s about Stalin and Lenin, and in the '90s about Vietnam, except to say that they all showed a great deal of politically-induced "I wanna believe" blindness. I'm no more concerned about conservative blindness than I am about liberal blindness, except I don't post on conservative boards and find preaching to the zealous who already believe to be a waste of breath so pointing out conservative foolishness here seems, well, foolish to me. Unless I want to hear a chorus of "amens" about how righteous we are and unrighteous they are. (My ego needs no boosting.)
Note that Cuba's still deeply entrenched in Venezuela, so while it hasn't invaded anybody, it's certainly not a bastion of progressivism except in a strictly early '50s sense of the word. Plus it's supporting a country that is doing a bit of bullying (just not invasion, merely invasion threats, but xenophobia has always been a bastion of authoritarian regimes ... whether Cuban, Venezuelan, Chinese, North Korea, Soviet Union, or Russian). Fortunately almost everybody's come to accept that China really isn't communist anymore, so there's no defending Chinese actions around the world; a lot of people assumed the USSR was socialist, and made allowances for Soviet support by Cuban proxy for some pretty reprehensible actors in Africa, South America, and even Asia.
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