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can anyone name me a communist country which has been successful
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Bit difficult - Cuba is the one that springs to mind, in that it's stable and there doesn't seem to be much local opposition to the government. It's poor, true, but it's also banned from trading with an economic superpower 90 miles away, which hardly helps. It's hard to untangle the damage caused to countries by having an inefficient system against that caused by economic sanctions imposed because people don't like their governments.
Libya is ostensibly socialist (but in reality an Arab nationalist dictatorship) and standards of living have risen there markedly since sanctions were lifted. However, it's noteworthy that Gaddafi rejected Soviet-style communism as well as western capitalism.
Yugoslavia was quite successful as a country due to tourism, but it can't exactly be claimed as a paragon of peace and tranquility after the last 15 years.
So if you're going to run a country on communist lines, have plenty of natural resources, preferably ones that don't need much intellectual capacity or foreign technology to exploit (like sandy beaches or tobacco), use the fact that you can basically do what you like to build big schemes that stop people having time to realise they're not free, try not to **** the US off (this may be impossible), don't waste money on weapons, because you won't have much money to start with and you'll need it all to bribe people into staying calm and watching them to make sure they do.
I don't think many people on here are going to defend communism as the best way to run a country - I'm certainly not. It's a busted flush, and anti-communist reds-under-the-bed positions are likewise irrelevant these days.