Between Hanoi And Havana.(Point of View)

At a recent meeting in Hanoi of a new global outfit called the Emerging Markets Forum, a group that is positioning itself as an emerging-economy, though business-oriented, alternative to Davos, participants were exposed to a fascinating perspective on the Vietnamese experiment. At the meeting--and during this writer's additional week touring the country--officials outlined a combination of rigorous one-party rule in the classic socialist style (including a Ho Chi Minh mausoleum indistinguishable from Mao's and

Lenin's, and a completely official, propagandistic press) with freewheeling, swashbuckling, barely regulated market economics. Over the past 15 years, Vietnam has grown 8 percent annually, and last year saw more than $18 billion in foreign investment--one of the highest totals in the world as a percentage of GDP.

Such an impressive performance (despite the current specter of rising inflation and slower growth) has led many to view the country as a model for nations now going through what Vietnam went through in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Socialist bloc. Example A: Cuba. Though Fidel Castro always regretted that the Vietnamese had become "revisionists" and "capitalist-roaders," it was his younger brother, Raol, who managed Cuba's tight relations with Vietnam. When he traveled to Hanoi in April 2005 for the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, he was said to be enthusiastic about what he saw. To Raol Castro, Vietnam has even more appeal than China, because of the enormous difference in size. Many of his Cuban friends and allies would also love to see on the island the same kind of economic reform and strong growth as Vietnam, coupled with a firm grasp on power and stability by the armed forces and the Communist Party.

Alas, even a cursory overview of Vietnam's experience suggests that it would be a difficult if not impossible fit for Cuba. First, Vietnamese society is much more hierarchical, homogeneous and isolated from the rest of the world than Cuba's. Vietnam has fought off five of what it calls imperial intrusions over the centuries--the Mongols, Han Chinese, French, Americans and modern Chinese--thanks to its incredible discipline and self-sacrifice. Cuba is, perhaps endearingly, the opposite: diverse, chaotic, always looking for a way around a problem, and it coexisted with three eras of foreign domination: Spain throughout the 19th century, the United States until 1959 and the Soviet Union through 1989.

Second, private ownership of land, housing, businesses, ...