Same thing all over the place. Castro went on a PR tour of the US trying to gather support and was snubbed long before he went to talk to the Soviets. Few years later his party finally called itself Socialist. Another few years and they finally called themselves Communist.

Ho Chi Mihn was a Comintern member, but the Viet Minh was a broader alliance that included nationalists and others as well alongside the communist party until it was clear that they would not be able to rely on the west for support. Ho even bean the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence with an explicit reference to the US Declaration of Independence [1], which he admired greatly.

And so on...

US governments kept throwing pro-democracy movements under the bus one after the other for large parts of the cold war in ways that made it trivially easy for the Soviet Union to buy themselves friends.

[1] http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1945vietnam.html

All in all it seems like social-democracy was AOK as long as you were an established European nation.

But try that with a colony or some place with a large US corporate presence (banana republic, anyone?) and you were begging for trouble.

Frankly the cold war seems in hindsight to be just an extension of the so called great game.

It's only the appearance of social-democracy that matters in Europe. It doesn't matter which party is in power, as long as policy is broadly neo-liberal and not too aggressively anti-corporate.

When someone like Jeremy Corbyn appears and challenges or threatens that consensus, you immediately get a determined media campaign to smear and undermine him - while barking mad racist demagogues are treated as serious political representatives without being questioned or challenged in the same ways.

Please do not confuse England with mainland Europe. There is a reason why so many English politicians want to distance themselves from Europe...

Yes...

United Fruit Company being a particularly nasty one to get on the wrong side of.

Its successor Chiquita as recently as 2007 pleaded guilty in US courts to aiding and abetting a Columbian terrorist organization, and got away with just paying $25m restitution, and the US government refused to allow extradition of any of the involved parties to stand trial in Columbia.

>who would you have aligned yourself with for financial & military support?

There wasn't really much of a choice. The west was sorta unofficially aligned with the Apartheid gov, so by default that puts revolutionaries on the soviet side. Idealogical the soviets were also a better fit.