Plenty, in a wide scale its shifted geopolitical engagements, both superpowers were trying to lean the other countries into their influence. I can speak for Latinamerica were for example US gave money in the whats is know as the Allience for the Progress for social projects, balancing their local coins, etc, is notably that the US also recommended agrarian reforms to heavy concentrated land ownership. This initiative was motivated by the possibility of the third world countries take a path toward socialism, as the conditions were pretty much there, poverty and inequality whit oligarchies how understand liberalism only the part of it that was beneficial for them. Seeing latinamerica of the xx century really fits into marxists perspectives of class struggle.

We have to understand that was a geopolitical issue that affected locals perspectives, so the economic dependence of the third world was label as imperialism instead of free transactions between sovereign countries. Now, this doesn’t mean, as the marxist orthodox would say, that whit the conditions for revolution we would end up whit a socialist state. Cuba’s case is a great to see for this claim, Fidel Castro before the revolution he didn’t even mention socialism in his writing, he was more a liberal struggling against a dictatorship. As events folds, USA opposing Castro (when he started to takeover American business in Cuba) fires up the classic realpolitik, your enemy (URSS in this case) is my friend. Cuba manage to get sweet deals whit the URSS -oil for sugar- not much for the ideology at begun, but more for the Cuban states needs. The Cuba allegiance to the URSS was somewhat forced by the political landscape at the time. As we know we would have the missiles crisis in 62’, were this little island put the world on the edge, a great example for when the “tail controls the dog”.

Let me give you another case, Chile. USA founded centrist presidential campaign of Eduardo Frei Montalva fearing the marxist candidate, Salvador Allende, would win. This guy Allende was a really pain on the ass for USA, when he did won the presidential race (at the next election) Nixon was pretty aware of the sabotage that he was traying to create (theres a recording talking whit Kissinger where they say we gonna sink the chilean economic, Nixon even say “Kick their ass”). This is backed whit the released documents on 1998 about CIA operations. If you want to know the soviets doing in the shadows I recommend “The shield and the Sword” by an ex-KGB and M15 (a book written by masters of lies yes, but I did check the soviet documents about Chile and they say pretty much the same).

To finish, let me give you my personal intake about this question. I like to favors the “local” explanation first instead of framing everything in “was the cold war so we did this”. But in this case I came to understand by watching interviews of people who actually lived the whole thing, they tend to bring this frame of thinking of cold war era, that for me is the biggest impact of it in people’s minds, its was a way to put the world in a mental order, a binary one thats pretty simple, to justify their actions and events going on. But not because is simple is a lie, today I give some credit to that binary atmosphere filled whit propaganda from all the sides and the microevents together.