The Twittersphere went wild Tuesday morning, when President Barack Obama exchanged a brief handshake with Cuban President Raúl Castro, brother of Fidel Castro, at the memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela.
The gesture was unplanned, according to the White House, but substantial nonetheless. Fifty years after the Communist revolution that placed Fidel Castro in power, the U.S. and Cuba still share no formal diplomatic relations. And the last time an American president shook hands with a Cuban leader was in 2000, when former President Bill Clinton exchanged greetings with Fidel Castro at a United Nations gathering in New York.
While some viewed Obama's handshake as a symbol of hope for reconciliation with Cuba, and others viewed the exchange as nothing more than diplomatic civility, there were, of course, those that chose to portray it as the latest traitorous act by our socialist commander-in-chief.
But if a handshake is truly an endorsement of every (or any) action undertaken by the other party, the United States really has a lot of explaining to do:

Stalin's record on human rights was atrocious, with the death toll directly attributable to his rule reaching around 20 million people. He was also obviously a communist.


A close ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia has had a controversial record on human rights Abdullah's rule.

Less than two years later, international forces including the U.S., helped topple Gaddafi over concerns about his brutal suppression of a civil war. Gaddafi would ultimately be killed by rebel forces in October of 2011.

Mubarak had a terrible record on human rights. In 2012, following a military coup, the former strongman was sentenced to life in prison for his role in a crackdown that killed hundreds of protesters during the Arab Spring. He was later released from jail.


Gingrich spoke out loudly and frequently against Arafat and the Palestinian role in peace talks throughout the 1990s, though he did also embrace the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1993.
During his run for president in 2011, he would say that he believed we had "invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs and historically part of the Arab community and they had the chance to go many places."



Thanks in part to Kissinger's help orchestrating the coup that led to the death of the democratically elected Salvador Allende, Pinochet's dictatorial rule extended up until 1998, though he relinquished the title of president in 1990. More than 3,200 people were executed or disappeared under his reign.

Assad has since been accused of widespread human rights abuses and war crimes in his attempts to suppress a violent civil war.
The U.S. threatened to mount military action against Assad earlier this year following allegations that he had launched a chemical weapons attack on civilians.