Socialism is the theory that workers should own the means of production. Communism is the theory that the workers should massacre the owners in order to get them. While socialism describes an ideal state of society, communism is explicitly a program for mass murder to achieve a much more vague definition of an ideal society. That is why, after establishing a communist state, communist governments continue to seek out and purge or murder heretics against the Marxist-Leninist state ideology (or “Mao Zedong thought”). Communism is not a theory, as dialectical materialism likes to pretend it is. At its best, communism is a political cult that attract white middle class college freshman. At its worst, communism is a state religion with all the inquisitions and mass murder and auto-genocide that comes with that.
Communism is unintelligible without perceived enemies of the working class. This was not a perversion by Lenin or Stalin; this is baked into the DNA of the writings of Marx, who dedicated a few thousand pages to misdescribing the economics of capitalism and his fantasies for mass murder, but comparatively few pages describing what the end result of that revolution looks like.
I can intellectually respect a Socialist who is convinced that the world would be better if all companies were worker coops, or if all business were regulated by state councils of proletarian soviets. I do not respect anybody claiming to be a communist in precisely the same way that I don’t respect anyone claiming to be a Nazi; they are equally evil and murderous ideologies that are responsible for tens if not over a hundred million deaths throughout the 20th century. Anybody who endorses this ideology in the 21st century is as low as a fucking neo-Nazi
Communism is an ideology about murdering capitalists. That is baked into its DNA. Maybe some western European philosophy professors came along in the 1950s and sanitized the idea for their undergrads, but the idea is and always has been about violently overthrowing capital owners. You discount Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, and vanguard theory, despite this covering virtually 99% of all communists who have ever lived.
Nazis want to impose a pseudoscientific system of racial hygiene and they massacred anyone who got in their way. Communists want worker ownership of the means of production and the massacred anyone who got in their way. I see no difference.
Cuba is an authoritarian regime which should be overthrown and replaced with a liberal democracy. It is absolutely not a success story