But their exploiters don't fly a red flag. The state which flies a red flag, the democratically elected governments with extremely high approval ratings, are obviously not the exploiters.

If you go to Cuba and ask around, the problems people might have with the government are probably gonna be related to censorship, not exploitation. The blame for people's economic woes will, unless you talk with a very confused person, be placed on the US blockade. It might be true that for the Cubans who work in a private business, they're being exploited by their bosses, but that's really not a primary concern because the conflict between countries is a much larger issue for everyone in the island. That's true in most of the global south, really, the exploitation done by the owners of little enterprises is very small compared the the larger problem of a nation's resources and sovereignty being trespassed. Those are conditions that make the abolition of capitalist exploitation impossible.

I think that it makes sense for the people in the global south socialist countries to keep their trust in their democratic governments. They're individually incapable of launching some kind of assault on US empire to bring it down, so this is just necessarily a slow process where more places in the world will slowly break away from the US, and the empire will collapse in time. Until then, would it really make sense for anyone to light molotov cocktails in Beijing, Havana, or Caracas? You realize that's exactly what the CIA wants?