Cuba’s Vietnam Visit Shows What It Still Refuses to Learn

A classroom can be a dangerous place for a government that has mistaken survival for success.

There are maps on the wall. There are old comrades in the front row. There is a blackboard covered with the evidence of somebody else’s escape from poverty. And there is always the same temptation: to copy only the handwriting, never the lesson.

Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla arrived in Hanoi this week as Cuba’s foreign minister and as a special envoy of the Party and government, meeting Vietnam’s leaders during a November 13–14 visit that was his second to the country this year. Vietnam’s President and Communist Party chief Tô Lâm received him in Hanoi. The two governments spoke, as they always do, of “special friendship,” solidarity, cooperation, and the durable grammar of revolutionary kinship. They also spoke of rice, pharmaceuticals, investment, consumer goods, tourism, and the need to make economic ties worthy of political ones. (Vietnam Government Portal, https://en.baochinhphu.vn/to-lam-hosts-cuban-special-envoy-11126111321253149.htm) (en.baochinhphu.vn)

Then came the sentence that should have landed harder in Havana than it did.

Rodríguez called the success of Vietnam’s Đổi Mới reforms a “major source of encouragement” for Cuba. (Vietnam Government Portal, https://en.baochinhphu.vn/to-lam-hosts-cuban-special-envoy-11126111321253149.htm) (en.baochinhphu.vn)

Encouragement is what one gives a child learning to ride a bicycle. It is not what a country needs when its own bicycle has no chain, its citizens are walking, and the state insists the broken machine is a matter of foreign sabotage rather than mechanical neglect.

Vietnam is not Cuba. It should not become Cuba’s alibi, nor should Cuba become a postcard version of Vietnam’s development. The countries emerged from different wars, sit in different geographies, possess different populations, markets, diasporas, neighbors, and relationships with Washington. Vietnam’s reforms did not produce liberal democracy. Its one-party state remains a one-party state. There is nothing morally clean about treating Hanoi as a ready-made political model.

But that is precisely why the comparison matters.

Vietnam did not wait to become politically pluralist before admitting that economic stagnation was not a revolutionary virtue. It did not call every productive concession a betrayal. It did not preserve scarcity as proof of ideological seriousness. It began, decades ago, to let prices speak, farmers produce, firms trade, investment enter, and policy bend toward the material life of ordinary people. The party remained in command. The economy did not remain embalmed.

Cuba has spent years trying to borrow the appearance of that lesson without accepting its cost.

It announces reforms, then attaches them to permissions. It admits private enterprise, then surrounds it with arbitrary imports, unstable rules, state monopolies, and inspection powers broad enough to make every entrepreneur provisional. It speaks of productive transformation while retaining a political system designed to ensure that no independent producer, worker, journalist, or citizen can become independently consequential. It wants the harvest without surrendering control of the field.

That is why Rodríguez’s visit to Vietnam has the peculiar quality of a student returning to the same classroom with a new notebook and no intention of taking notes.

The Vietnamese side appears to understand the mismatch. Tô Lâm said economic cooperation must be raised to a level matching the two countries’ political relationship; Vietnam also pledged to continue rice and pharmaceutical projects and to encourage Vietnamese firms to form joint ventures in Cuba. (Vietnam Government Portal, https://en.baochinhphu.vn/to-lam-hosts-cuban-special-envoy-11126111321253149.htm) (en.baochinhphu.vn) Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry and state news agencies separately described the visit as an effort to turn old fraternity into more substantive economic cooperation. (Vietnam Plus, https://en.vietnamplus.vn/vietnam-cuba-discuss-measures-to-enhance-special-ties-post355396.vnp; World & Vietnam Report, https://en.baoquocte.vn/foreign-minister-le-hoai-trung-holds-talks-with-cuban-foreign-minister-bruno-rodriguez-parrilla-468693.html) (en.vietnamplus.vn)

“Matching” is diplomatic language. It means the politics are grander than the commerce. The embrace is warmer than the transaction. The history is sturdier than the results.

Cuba has been living inside that imbalance for a long time. Friendship can deliver rice. It can finance a clinic, sustain a pharmaceutical project, provide technical advice, open a market at the margin. It cannot substitute for a domestic order in which people are permitted to make decisions that matter. It cannot repair a state that treats its own citizens as recipients of arrangements negotiated elsewhere.

There is, of course, a serious counter-case. Cuba is under extraordinary external pressure. The American embargo, and its recent escalation into measures that constrict energy, trade, and the willingness of foreign firms to take risks on the island, are not inventions of Havana’s propaganda department. They impose real costs on Cuban families and make every reform harder, more expensive, and more vulnerable to reversal. To say this is not to pardon the regime. It is to describe the terrain honestly.

Nor is Vietnam’s road simply available for Havana to walk. Washington’s posture toward Cuba is harsher; the island is smaller, more import-dependent, and more deeply entangled in six decades of economic distortion. A reform process cannot be photocopied from Hanoi and stapled onto the Palace of the Revolution.

But external pressure does not explain the Cuban government’s peculiar aversion to creating citizens who can act without its supervision. It does not explain why reform is repeatedly made conditional on political obedience. It does not explain why a state that can praise Vietnam’s achievement abroad still fears the practical implications of Vietnamese-style seriousness at home: property with durability, enterprise with autonomy, rules with consistency, agriculture that responds to those who work the land, and public life in which criticism is not defined as sabotage.

The painful irony is that Cuba’s leaders know the lesson. Rodríguez said so in Hanoi. Vietnam’s success encourages them.

It encourages them because it proves that a communist government can outlive economic rigidity. It encourages them because it shows that sovereignty need not mean administrative paralysis. It encourages them because it offers the one thing Cuba’s ruling class most wants: continuity without collapse.

Yet encouragement is safer than imitation. It asks nothing immediate. It permits another meeting, another protocol, another delegation photograph beneath two flags. It turns a working model into a ceremonial object.

The 2015–2017 opening with the United States was a historical window, not a template waiting in storage. It cannot be restored by sentiment, and it cannot be reproduced by a future handshake alone. That opening mattered because it briefly joined outside contact to the possibility of internal movement. Cuba now has neither the same opening nor the luxury of treating reform as a performance for visitors.

In Hanoi, the blackboard is still there. The figures are still written plainly enough to read. Cuba’s delegation can admire the lesson indefinitely.

It cannot pass the class by applauding it.