I have talked with some people from Cuba and Venezuela (expats) that support the west narrative about poverty and mismanagement.

Expats from LatAm to the West is a very biased sample that tends to be massively biased towards people that have more affluent backgrounds, identify with privileged racial and ethnic identities, and already idolized rich Western countries, often to a self-hating degree. You'll have the exact opposite impression if you visit those countries and speak to theb people there.

Their idolatry of the rich West usually makes this pretty easy to identify because they will eventually say things that align with sociopathic right wing American talking points. Let's say you're talking about economic conditions in their country of origin. If it's in the context of blaming the leftish government, they will describe them in the most extreme terms and try to get you to empathize with their own personal plight as some business owner or privileged college kid. If you point out the US' primary role in creating those conditions, e.g. via sanctions, they will eventually justify those sanctions, even saying their country deserved it, showing that their empathy doesn't extend much past their own socioeconomic background. This contradiction is fundamental to US propaganda, the way it vilified designated enemy countries (where being an enemy can be as simple as nationalizing your own country's resources). Those countries must be made deserving of violence, you can't just tell Americans that you're imposing poverty on a country because it means the US won't be able to extract as much value from it and your tool of choice is economic terrorism, all part of a coup attempt.

So, to be deserving, there needs to be a media campaign about how bad the country's government is, and false pretenses about what sanctions do. There is an entire lexicon used almost exclusively for designated enemies' governments, even a dedicated writing style, and it's consistently employed by US government institutions and their helpful sycophantic journalists employed by newspapers whose owners always see value in aligning with the pro-US position. The enemy government mustn't be called a government, it's a regime. Its popularity in the country cannot be mentioned, this would conflict with calling it authoritarian or totalitarian. The leader(s) must be depicted as power-hungry dictators at all times. If term limits are removed in a "bad" country and he leader is repeatedly elected, this is automatically because the leader is just extending their own rule. When a "good" country, like Germany, elected Angela Nerkel fir a much longer time, this isn't even described in negative terms, it's ignored. When a different leader is elected but is still of the leftish government, the idea of democracy must still be undermined - oh they're just a "hand-picked successor". Note that Biden does not get this label. But even with independent observers showing the transition from Chavez to Maduro was highly democratic and legitimate, that's how he's described.

All of this language serves a single purpose: to villify a country so that it is deserving of the violence the US wants to impose on it to achieve "regime change". It is applied in an incredibly biased way and is usually targeted at Americans so that they don't push back too much when the violence starts. Unilaterally-imposed sanctiobs against everyday civilians, depriving them of foid, shelter, medicine, stability. Coup attempts on the government, forcing it to take more defensive posturing. Funding of the opposition and right wing media to build up domestic terrorism, up to and including death squads. The unluckiest "enemies" will be bombed and possibly occupied. They must be made deserving, otherwise Americans would need to confront the evil they consistently support.

The people you've spoken to are almost certainly extremely gullible towards these narratives and have a self-serving means to rationalize their own decisions, which usually amount to a very simple thing: they idoluzed the rich West and wanted more money.