In 1945, the Red Army and the American army were sent to rid Korea of the Japanese. Afterwards, China installed a communist government in the North and the Americans created a democracy in the South. North Korea attempted to take over South Korea resulting in the Korean War which lasted from 1950 to 1953. It ended with a cease-fire instead of a peace treaty.
In a similar situation in Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh and his communists fought to rid the country of the colonial French and form a communist system. He defeated the French after an eight year conflict ending in 1954. They were forced to retreat to the anti-communist South whereas the North was a Stalinist regime controlled by Ho Chi Minh. The North saw that people in the South were suffering in poverty and were ripe for a revolution. The revolution in the South caught the attention of the US who feared the spread of Communism.
From 1965 to 1973, the Americans joined in the fighting, but two years after they left defeated, Vietnam became a united Communist country. It was horribly inefficient; collective farming resulted in famine, officials were all corrupt and human rights violations were prevalent. On top of this, the government sent Vietnamese soldiers to occupy neighboring Cambodia for over ten years resulting in a costly was with China in 1979. People were fleeing in droves for better lives.
For all that was wrong with Vietnam, Cambodia was exponentially worse. The communist Khmer Rouge took over in 1975. Their first order of business was to destroy all the cities and move everyone into the country. Two million people (one fourth of the Cambodian population) died in the killing fields from brutal cleansing of intellectuals and anyone assessed as being harmful to the new regime. The leader of this reign of terror was Pol Pot, who died of natural causes in 1998. The Khmer Rouge was driven back to guerilla warfare in the jungles when the Vietnamese invaded with their own, undeniably better communist government.
In the mid to late twentieth century, three South American countries had communist revolutions. In 1959, Fidel Castro staged a coup in Cuba, the most important of the three countries. In 1979, the New Jewel Movement created a Marxist government in Grenada which lasted until American invasion in 1983. Nicaragua had a brief experiment with communism after the Sandinista rebels seized control in 1979. After a civil war was fought, free elections were held and the communists were voted out.
When he first overthrew the Cuban government, Castro was not even communist, although many of his associates were. He was, however, anti-American which led him into the arms of the Soviets and into the communist ideology. America, again fearing the spread of communism, sent in anti-Castro Cuban exiles trained by the CIA. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a complete fiasco, drawing Cuba even closer to the USSR.
