Why should Raúl Castro’s Cuba be different? Mo

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Why should Raúl Castro’s Cuba be different? Money trumps liberty, which can be cumbersome and erratic. Give Havana a mere decade and it will be well down the Ho Chi Minh City road.

Vietnam has been a remarkable success story. Annual trade with the United States has soared from a mere $220 million in 1994 to $29.6 billion in 2013. Four decades after the napalm, commerce has overcome enmity. America is a hedge against China; the temporary enemy has become a partner of sorts against the eternal enemy.

Cuba Heads for Miami

Roger Cohen MARCH 21, 2016

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — So Havana is 20 years behind Ho Chi Minh City on the development cycle that brings you bulldozed historical districts; traffic-clogged streets; a skyline of cranes; fancy golf courses for expats and the local elite; lattes galore; burger joints; smartphones everywhere; a middle class with disposable income; the seductions of credit; fragrant shopping malls; brand heaven (or hell); the end of virgin beaches; massive real estate developments with names like “Central Park”; offshore fortunes for the political architects of capitalist communism; resorts with their manicured lawns; casinos; mass tourism; social media; 6 percent annual growth; mom-and-pop entrepreneurship; suburbia and sprinklers; private schools for kids with Ivy League colleges already in their sights; Asian and Latin American versions of the American dream; and a population fired up and sort of freed by the opportunity to make a buck for the first time in generations.

In Cuba’s case, come to think of it, the process will almost certainly go quicker. It’s located closer to Miami. American hotel chains are already circling, or pouncing.

The world has sped up since the mid-1990s, when Vietnam embarked on the opening that has fast-forwarded its economy over the past two decades. Like China, it has demonstrated that nothing fires up capitalism quite like Communist political control in 21st-century guise.

Why should Raúl Castro’s Cuba be different? Money trumps liberty, which can be cumbersome and erratic. Give Havana a mere decade and it will be well down the Ho Chi Minh City road.

Over all, that’s good for Cubans, yet the homogenizing effect of global commerce has become so familiar that it’s difficult to look at images of President Obama strolling the streets of Old Havana with his family and not feel — along with the thrill of this needed breakthrough — a twinge of ambivalence.

It is a wonderful thing to have an American president in Cuba for the first time in almost nine decades, and equally wonderful to see the thawing of a half-century of American-Cuban hostility that had become anachronistic and pointless.

But by now we know enough of how development can look — and how it can race ahead without accompanying political liberalization — to rejoice with some reserve. Cuba is certain to lose a fraction of its soul as money works its fascination. All the new malls may do nothing for the miserable fate of dissidents with democratic obsessions.

Vietnam has been a remarkable success story. Annual trade with the United States has soared from a mere $220 million in 1994 to $29.6 billion in 2013.

Four decades after the napalm, commerce has overcome enmity. America is a hedge against China; the temporary enemy has become a partner of sorts against the eternal enemy.

The Vietnamese, their lives improving, express overwhelmingly positive views of America. Obama is expected here later this year to cement a new partnership important to the future of the United States as a China-offsetting power in Asia.

It would be surprising if the Cuba opening did not produce similar rapid development and steady rapprochement with the United States. The Cuban revolution had its achievements, not least in education and medicine, but lost its raison d’être long ago. It was a generator of misery and paralysis on an epic scale — lives wasted, hopes quashed, youths reduced to idleness and inertia.

The possibilities about to emerge for millions of Cubans are reason enough to say that, while it’s no panacea, the Obama-Castro entente is cause for celebration.

When I was in Cuba eight years ago for the 50th anniversary of the revolution, I wrote: “On my first day in Havana I wandered down to the Malecón, the world’s most haunting urban seafront promenade. A norte was blustering, sending breakers crashing over the stone dike built in 1901 under short-lived American rule. Bright explosions of spray unfurled onto the sidewalk.

“I was almost alone on a Sunday morning in Cuba’s capital city of 2.2 million people. A couple of cars a minute passed, often finned ’50s beauties, Studebakers and Chevrolets, extravagant and battered. Here and there, a stray mutt scrounged. Washing flapped on the ornate ironwork balconies of crumbling mansions. Looking out on the ocean, I searched in vain for a single boat.”

Goodbye to all that. The imprisoning sea off Cuba will be imprisoning no more; it will grow dense with container ships and the masts of yachts before long. New buildings will rise and the old will be torn down. That is good, of course it is. Yet the global mall and tourist destination do leave something to be desired.

You never know, as Vietnam and Cuba demonstrate. America loses a war against Communism in Southeast Asia, and in time capitalism triumphs.

“The white man is finished in Asia,” said Ho Chi Minh. Well, not quite, as it transpired.

“A revolution is not a bed of roses,” said Fidel Castro. Nor is the end of the revolution.

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