Fair point. I don't doubt there's some cherry picking going on. I mostly appreciate the book for its critiques of capitalism and US imperialism (but i can see how someone who is already aware of these things might then just see the book's intentions as shilling for communism).

It similarly taught me about Kerala, formerly one of the poorest states in India, that has since grown its per capita income to 50% higher than the national average partly (mostly?) due to its strong Marxist organising. This makes me think there's probably something "there" with communism as opposed to my prior beliefs that it was all BS.

I also now appreciate that there's a lot of propaganda concerning communism that is disseminated by the West, so it is necessary to approach opposing information with a bit more scepticism. I'll let this quote from the book do the talking:

Traveling across Cuba in 1959, immediately after the overthrow of the U.S.-supported right-wing Batista dictatorship, Mike Faulkner witnessed "a spectacle of almost unrelieved poverty." The rural population lived in makeshift shacks without minimal sanitation. Malnourished children went barefoot in the dirt and suffered "the familiar plague of parasites common to the Third World." There were almost no doctors or schools. And through much of the year, families that depended solely on the seasonal sugar harvest lived close to starvation (Monthly Review, 3/96). How does that victimization in pre-revolutionary Cuba measure against the much more widely publicized repression that came after the revolution, when Castro's communists executed a few hundred of the previous regime's police assassins and torturers, drove assorted upper-class moneybags into exile, and intimidated various other opponents of radical reforms into silence?

By and large I don't think I (or any of us for that matter) have a problem with communists, but with tankies. The ones that can't keep themselves from defending imperialists, genociders, authoritarians, monarchs and racists because they do the single task of opposing Western hegemony.

No book will sell me on that!