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Vietnam doesn’t have a lot of communist friends left. So for its latest tribute to good old revolutionary ideals it’s looking to Che Guevara.
Ho Chi Minh City is currently in the process of renaming a slew of streets – part of an exercise in honoring a national war hero. And one of them is slated to carry the name of the most wearable Marxist of them all: el Che.
Street naming is always a symbolic affair, but in an increasingly capitalistic Vietnam this moment stands out. The country already leaves prices mostly up to the market, and this year it will take an even bigger step down the capitalist path by privatizing hundreds of state-owned firms.
To maintain some Red cred, cosmetic gestures like the renaming are “cheap,” according to one former US diplomat who continues to research the country. “It’s a way to show that socialism or socialist ideals remain alive in Vietnam, without costing anything,” said David Brown, a one-time political officer recently on one of his frequent visits to Ho Chi Minh City.
Paying homage to Ernesto “Che” Guevara makes sense, somewhat. The Argentine revolutionary famously backed the Viet Cong guerrilla force that fought against South Vietnam during the war in the 1960s. In a 1967 speech, Mr. Guevara said the world needed “two, three, or many Vietnams” to achieve a true proletarian revolution. The new street sign will in some ways serve as a thank you, 47 years later.
Still, it’s a bit of an odd choice. Sure, books about Mr. Guevara have been translated into Vietnamese, and he occasionally shows up on restaurant walls or in museum exhibits here alongside Marx and Lenin, two other famous communists. But most Vietnamese would not recognize Mr. Guevara on a T-shirt – where his face is ubiquitous – let alone know what he fought for.
Odder still is that Che Guevara Street is coming here to the city formerly known as Saigon. Unlike Hanoi, the conservative capital up north, Ho Chi Minh City has a long history of entrepreneurship and trade. It does hang hammer-and-sickle flags and posters as far as the eye can see, but it is not as overt in its communist solidarity as Hanoi – there’s no Lenin park here, for instance.
The few streets that are named after foreigners are non-ideological, such as Alexander de Rhodes, who helped Romanize the Vietnamese script.
The impetus for this municipal makeover was the death last October of Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, the last of Vietnam’s great revolutionary war heroes and second only to Ho Chi Minh. In the wake of his death, people’s committees, similar to city councils, have set about renaming their streets in his honor. And it seems that while they’re at it, Ho Chi Minh City officials have decided to put a few other communists on the map as well.
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