Vietnamese People Assist Cuba, my comments

 

Vietnamese Are Helping Cuba With 38-Cent Donations. A Lot of Them.

 

Cuba sent doctors and food to Vietnam during the war. Now ordinary Vietnamese are sending cash to struggling Cubans.

Cuban soldiers during a visit last year by Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam.

Credit...

Pool photo by Adalberto Roque

 

By Damien Cave

Damien Cave is based in Vietnam and has written about Cuba for more than two decades.

 

Aug. 19, 2025

 

Dinh Hien Mo was skimming social media on Sunday at her home in Central Vietnam when she stumbled on a post calling for aid to Cuba, where hunger has been spreading as inflation soars.

 

She watched videos and read about how Cuba supported Vietnam during the wars of the 1960s and ‘70s, building hospitals and sending doctors, sugar and cattle. Inspired, she donated 500,000 Vietnamese dong, about $19, from the modest income she earns at her family’s grocery store.

 

“I feel bad that people in Cuba are suffering from economic hardship,” she said. “They’re isolated by sanctions and their economy is cut off from the world — Vietnam used to be like that, but we opened up, and life here is much better.”

 

Her donation joined a chain-reaction of generosity. A new crowdfunding campaign for Cuba led by the Central Committee of the Vietnam Red Cross Society has raised more than $13 million in the first week — far more than organizers had expected for the entire two-month effort.

And with that unexpected surge has come a complex reckoning. For many in Cuba and Vietnam, the charitable transfers bring up memories of past solidarity, when both nations shared dreams of Communist independence won through revolution. But there’s also the awkward realization that their roles have reversed because of choices made as the Cold War ended.

 

Vietnam, when faced with shortages and starvation, pivoted quickly toward free enterprise in the mid-80s, leading to restored relations with the United States in 1995, and a manufacturing and agricultural boom that has nearly erased extreme poverty.

 

Cuba stuck with ideology and one-man rule. The island nation, which had an unequal but developed economy roughly on par with Argentina’s in the 1950s, remained in the intransigent grip of Fidel Castro until his death in 2016. Even after President Barack Obama visited Cuba, seeking to end decades of hostility, Mr. Castro, his brother Raúl, and their handpicked successors maintained strict state control of the economy.

 

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A street in downtown Havana.

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Norlys Perez/Reuters

 

A U.S. trade embargo had been limiting Cuba’s options since 1962. Compounding that challenge, Cuba’s leaders failed to empower the country’s well-educated population. In the years when I covered the island’s flirtations with openness, from 1999 to 2016, the best that most Cubans could do was start small restaurants or other home-based businesses that the government harassed with high taxes and hefty regulations.

 

Vietnamese economists — the architects of the country’s success story — frequently traveled to Havana throughout this period, offering guidance and lectures. They said that many of their presentations drawing on what worked well in Vietnam, like letting people start small businesses without permits, were kept secret by Cuban officials.

 

“They didn’t want to implement the freedom to do business,” said Le Dang Doanh, the former head of Vietnam’s Central Institute for Economic Management.

 

Today, Cuba is on its knees. Tourism never recovered from the pandemic. Facing tougher enforcement of the embargo from Washington, everything seems to be breaking down at once.

Blackouts have spread because of a decaying power grid and a lack of fuel. Consumer prices have risen fourfold over the past five years, according to experts, spurring migration and putting already-scarce food and medicine beyond the reach of many workers.

Even the infant mortality rate, which Cuba’s leaders had proudly brought to levels lower than the United States, has been rising.

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“Cuba is in very bad shape,” said Carlos Alzugaray, an analyst and former Cuban diplomat in Havana. “And those who are in power don’t seem to know what to do either because they are ignorant, or inept, or corrupt, or don’t care or because they are terrified about losing control if they go too far in opening up.”

 

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A specialist from Vietnam checking the grain quality at a rice field in Los Palacios, Cuba, in May.

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Adalberto Roque/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

Vietnam, while supporting Cuba’s call for the United States to drop its embargo, has become even more determined to help. Most of the rice that Cubans receive through government rations are donations from Vietnam. Last year, To Lam, Vietnam’s top leader, visited the island and promised closer ties.

 

The crowdfunding campaign, which aims to celebrate the 65th year of diplomatic relations between the two countries, represents a more emotional step of people-to-people connection. It has attracted more than 1.7 million donations, mostly from 38 cents (or 10,000 dong) to $38.

 

Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, the president of Cuba, posted a public thank you note on X over the weekend, expressing gratitude for “an act of love” that comes from “a hardworking and heroic people who were able to rise up after several wars and today dazzle the world with their sustained progress.”

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He did not say how Vietnam’s money would be used.

Some Vietnamese critics online said it made no sense to support leaders who have made the Cuban people poor. Donors said they just hoped the cash transfers would get to the people in need.

 

“I know the support from Vietnam won’t be enough to solve everything, but I hope it helps in some way,” said Ms. Mo, 33. “And I hope their economy will get better so people there can have better lives.”

 

Tung Ngo contributed reporting from Hanoi.

Damien Cave leads The Times’s new bureau in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, covering shifts in power across Asia and the wider world.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/world/asia/vietnam-cuba-fundraising.html

My comments posted with on-line publication

(1) 

I traveled to Viet Nam more than forty times between April 30, 1975 and 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of peace and reunification. 

I traveled to Cuba 64 times from 1971 to last December, all but the first time since 1997.

In both cases it was as a nongovernmental peace and development activist seeking normal diplomatic, economic, cultural, educational and political relations.

From 1975 to 1986 life for Vietnamese was harder than life for Cubans.  The level of economic development was lower and the isolation was greater.   The Sixth Party Congress launched reforms of everything but the one party political system.  The transformation of agriculture was virtually immediate when state farms and cooperatives restored control of land to families. 

Internal reform proceeded substantially but irregularly because the US maintained a harsh embargo of Viet Nam until President Clinton ended it prior to normalizing relations.  US allied countries limited investment and trade until Washington began to change.

China was not happy with Viet Nam's victory in 1975 and became an overt enemy supporting the Khmer Rouge and invading in 1979.  Normalization with everyone but the US began also in 1986.   Today the US and Viet Nam are comprehensive strategic partners, in part because of shared concern about China. 

(The Cuba side in my next post.)

 

(2)

I began my frequent pro-normalization trips to Cuba for the Fund for Reconciliation and Development in 1997 at an academic conference in Havana on Asia.  I spoke about our successful twenty year campaign for normalization with Vietnam. 

The Cubans were enthusiastic as Fidel Castro was about to visit Viet Nam. They expected the success of US normalization and Vietnamese reforms would reinforce changes that had emerged in Cuba in the 1990s Special Period.

Instead Fidel bemoaned that the Vietnamese had lost their socialist soul.  The movement for internal reform retreated until after his death when Raul Castro began its resuscitation.   

There is no question that the harsh and comprehensive nature of the unilateral US embargo has, as intended, done serious damage to the Cuban economy and psychology.  The dramatic impact of the Obama opening on the social and economic environment was inescapable and instructive.  Both countries failed to go as far and as fast as they could. 

Obama was hampered because the economic warfare of the embargo remained in place.  His positive initiatives were denounced by hard liners in both countries, in Cuba as a trojan horse.  The US distanced itself slightly by abstaining on the annual UN anti embargo vote and praising Cuba's medical teams.

Trump 1 reversed most of Obama. Biden largely left that in place.  Tourism is damaged by the false US listing as a State Sponsor of Terrorism and by Cuba's prohibition of a private sector role.

 

(3)

 Apologies for going on at length.  I am obviously seized by Viet Nam - Cuba comparisons. 

Travel as mentioned above is a good illustration.  On the US side, Trump 1 unchanged by Biden destroyed large scale US travel by barring cruises and use of hotels.  Biden let stand until his last week in office the unjustified Trump listing of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism which meant any European who visits Cuba loses the indispensable visa waiver to enter the US for ten years.

On its side Cuba has kept virtually all aspects of the travel sector a State monopoly.  Tourism grew dramatically in Viet Nam when it permitted foreign investment in and ownership of hotels and allowed national private tour operators and travel agents.  While Cuba permits private bed and breakfasts and taxis it has even refused to license private guides and travel agents.  As a result, it has cut itself off from partnership with small scale US travel agents.

Of greater significance is the agricultural sector.  Cuba maintains rigid State control over cooperatives and even private farmers through the ACOPIO system.    Viet Nam returned control of land to family farmers and quickly became an exporter.

Cuba's fear of creating a market economy with socialist characteristics may be due to proximity to the US and to right wing exiles or to a lack of Party leaders like Nguyen Van Linh, Vo Van Kiet and Phan Van Khai.  We won't know until Pres Trump has the courage to end the embargo.

 

 

My suggestion to Vietnamese friends about how they might provide their help:

An ideal form of assistance would be to provide packages of seed, fertilizer, insecticide and battery powered farm equipment with the understanding that the recipients, both coops and independent farmers, must be free to sell excess produce to wherever they choose, the state distributor (ACOPIO) or private markets.

It could be channeled through the mass organization of small farmers, ANAP.  They are part of the Party controlled structure but have pushed back for the interests of their members, including during the half-hearted land lease program.

The Women's Federation is also possible.  Years ago I asked whether they were aware of the great success of the Viet Nam Women's Union with microfinance projects (sewing machines, pigs, etc.)  They said yes, wishing they could do the same but had not been permitted to.

Because the sponsoring organization in Viet Nam is the Fatherland Front, it could logically partner with its Cuban counterpart mass organizations.

There is an old saying among NGOs that it is better to provide a net to a fisherman than to provide fish.

Maybe Vietnamese aid could be concentrated in the Isle of Youth and become a social and economic experiment.