Respectfully, this question sounds like it is coming from a context of the US being a nation that deals with other regimes fairly and in good faith. This is not at all the case, most especially in the Caribbean and Central America. The crimes of the US are unfathomably legion in these areas and well understood by pretty much everyone, except Americans. Millions of lives lost, dozens of democratically elected regimes deposed, the list goes on and on. Cuba holds this standing because the Castro regime has resisted the will of US foreign policy and survived. Everything that one could report that is wrong with Cuba: human rights issues, poverty... the US's policies are causal a great deal to all of these.
US investment is the single greatest causal factor for prosperity in Latin America. Look at Panama and Chile, for example. In fact, the midas touch of American investment is visible in several other places outside of the Americas, including Taiwan and South Korea.
In my view, it is hard to label the immense prosperity-inducing capacity of United States foreign investment as bad-faith or unfair dealing. Cuba's government has spent years working on projects to attract spend-happy American tourists. Elsewhere in the region, entire countries base their economies around remittances from the USA. The US government could crack down on remittances and illegal immigration far more than already happens, but it does not, and millions of people in the region benefit as a result.
Respectfully, it takes a great deal of time, study, and travel to learn the dynamics involved in a region before you can say with confidence that Influence A is good and Influence B is bad. People who lean left in the US should understand that 'socialist' isn't a catch-all phrase; it means something different when you're voting for Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Caucuses than it does when you're bartering with your uncle for soap in Camaguey. I have been all over Latin America and I personally still don't consider myself to know all there is to know about the region. What I do know is that the "USA bad" narrative tends rarely to be accompanied with a discussion of the counterfactual universe where American influence is hypothetically absent from the region.
