I’m just quoting Amnesty International.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2016/11/fidel-castro-s-human-rights-legacy-a-tale-of-two-worlds/

Yes, some people may not realize that the Cuban Revolution ousted a U.S.-backed military dictator, Fulgencio Batista, who presided over a stagnating economy that widened the gap between rich and poor Cubans and awarded contracts to foreign companies. He also negotiated lucrative relationships with the American Mafia, who controlled the drug, gambling, and prostitution businesses in Havana. His secret police carried out wide-scale violence, torture, and public executions.

Batista was definitely a bad guy, and he was a U.S.-backed bad guy. It's no wonder the revolutionaries won support and influenced similar movements in other countries.

Castro also ruthlessly suppressed freedom of expression and exercised totalitarian rule. However, he did make substantial improvements to healthcare and education and won admiration for successfully defying the United States.

There are several factors involved including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health and numbers of the Roman population, the strength of the economy, the competence of the emperors, the internal struggles for power, the religious changes of the period, and the efficiency of the civil administration. All of this made the western half of the empire weak and vulnerable. They didn’t even deal with the non-Romans who crossed the Rhine, let alone those who remained on the other side.

I’m getting this from a lot of sources. It’s just a general trend among ancient Chinese historians.

For example, Records of the Grand Historian is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories and was written in the early 1st century BC by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian. But it covered a 2,500-year period! That’s why modern historians don’t take everything in it as gospel.

Yes but Pinker’s argument has nothing to do with individual rulers.

You always have to be careful about claims that one dynasty is more modest and moral than its predecessor, since it's likely the historians or storytellers in the new dynasty writing about the old one. The oracle bones and tombs from the Shang Dynasty suggest it was highly bureaucratic, meticulous about keeping records, and orderly in arranging the tombs. There's no archaeological evidence of lakes of wine or forests of meat or mass torture.

Many modern historians believe the last king in the Shang Dynasty was as reasonable and intelligent as most rulers and not as decadent and cruel as following dynasties portrayed him to be. China is justifiably proud of its long history, but modern archaeology and historical research has often cast doubt on the reliability of written records, let alone popular folklore and literature.

Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon, by B. H. Liddell Hart. This focuses on the war with Carthage, particularly with Hannibal. Scipio Africanus was the Roman who defeated Hannibal.

Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome, by Stephen Dando-Collins. As the title suggest, this focuses on a much later period, during and sometime after the career of Julius Caesar.