Political Memes

They've all quickly devolved into totalitarian regimes

Tell me you haven't studied the political structures of Cuba and the USSR since the 60s without telling me you haven't.

While both countries have a high level of concentration of power on bureaucratic elites when it comes to big policy, there were/are a ton of democratic mechanisms that simply don't exist in the west. Extremely high rates of unionization with unions having big decision-making power in the workplaces and outside them, party-membership being encouraged with extremely high rates of it compared to western democracies, neighborhood councils having actual decision-making power both through legal mechanisms and through funding to enact desired local policy... If you want to learn of a particularly interesting instance, you can read the book "how the worker's parliaments saved the Cuban revolution" by Pedro Ross, in which it's detailed how massive democratic participation in the early 90s after the dismantling of the USSR ensured the survival of the country in an astronomical economic crisis.

You also say this as if western countries were democratic at all, as if putting a ballot once every 4-5 years ensured popular decision-making. Study after study show that public support for policy in the west is a terrible predictor of whether that policy is adopted or not, and vice-versa, i.e., public opinion and policy are uncorrelated. The fact that you can't easily point to a particular authority responsible for this, doesn't make the system any more democratic, it just makes it look less authoritarian. Who in France supported the rise of the retirement age? Who in Europe supported austerity policy after the 2008 crisis? What percentage of US citizens don't support socialized healthcare?