A Cuban identified as David Domínguez Francisco published last Thursday a reel on Instagram documenting his arrival in Hanoi, Vietnam, after more than 26 hours of travel, and the numerous similarities he found between the Vietnamese capital and Cuba, from the omnipresence of communist symbols to the figure of Ho Chi Minh on all the country's banknotes.
The video, just under two minutes long, has garnered more than 13,000 views, 1,273 likes, and 112 comments, and is part of the viral phenomenon of Cubans sharing their travel experiences around the world.
The first thing that caught David's attention was the proliferation of flags displaying the hammer and sickle alongside the Vietnamese national flag.
"Everything is plastered with little communist flags. Even coming from Cuba, one is not used to seeing this symbol so widely spread," he stated. Seeing the sickle and hammer "has become quite normalized, and it's almost the same as seeing their flag because they rarely appear without each other."
Another detail that surprised him was that all Vietnamese dong banknotes feature the image of Ho Chi Minh, in denominations ranging from 100 to 500,000 dong.
"Here, all the bills feature the same person, Ho Chi Minh. You see, when I was a child, I was taken a lot to Acapulco Park to see monuments of this figure. I never understood why, but well," he commented, referring to the Ho Chi Minh Park in Nuevo Vedado, Havana.
The chaos of traffic was also a key part of the story. David described a city where almost everyone gets around by motorcycle.
"Men ride on motorbikes, women ride on motorbikes, your grandmother rides on a motorbike, even the dogs ride on motorbikes," he said, adding that "crossing the street is an act of faith."
The creator also highlighted the unique architecture of Hanoi, characterized by extremely narrow and tall buildings, a result of an old tax that was imposed on the width of facades.
On his first day, he visited the famous train street in Hanoi, an alley in the old town built by the French in 1902, where an active train passes just centimeters from houses, cafes, and shops.
"The safety measures depend on your own awareness, but the atmosphere, I must say, is a 10," he noted. The group took home as a memento a bottle cap crushed by the train.
David also found Hanoi particularly lively due to the decorations that still remained from the Vietnamese Lunar New Year, celebrated on February 17.
"Recently it was the Lunar New Year, and there was still quite a bit of decoration. The 'Old Quarter' of Hanoi was very well decorated, with many lights; the city felt very alive," he/she recounted.
Cuba and Vietnam share a one-party communist political system and similar revolutionary iconography, but their economic trajectories have diverged radically since 1986, when Vietnam implemented the "doi moi" reform that opened its economy to the private market.
Between 2009 and 2020, Vietnam's GDP grew at an annual rate of 5.9%, while Cuba barely reached 0.9% during the same period. However, the Cuban regime has explicitly rejected adopting the economic opening model of the Asian country.
Officially, the relations between Cuba and Vietnam have had notable chapters. In August 2025, Díaz-Canel and Lis Cuesta arrived in Hanoi in a rented plane costing $11,000 per hour, amid the profound economic crisis that the island is experiencing.
Cuban David Domínguez closed his video with a promise to share more stories with his followers: "Vietnam has so many things that reminded me of Cuba. Its nature, its people, and that thing (the Communist Party), but I'll tell you more about that another day."
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