HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — For months, a giant portrait of Vietnam's revolutionary leader, Ho Chi Minh, stared out across a central square at a billboard showing the American fashion model Cindy Crawford.
"The glorious victory of communism will last 1,000 years," the portrait of Ho Chi Minh proclaimed. Crawford's portrait, offering for sale an expensive watch to count the hours, smiled enticingly and said nothing.
The portrait of Crawford is gone now as this raucous, bustling city — still known to almost everybody as Saigon — smartened itself up to celebrate the high point of Vietnamese communism: What Hanoi calls the liberation of the nation, after 30 years of war, from foreign domination by the French and then the Americans.
It was 25 years ago, on April 30, 1975, that the last fleeing helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy and the first tanks of the victorious North Vietnamese smashed through the gates of the presidential palace a few blocks away.
But in its way, a quarter of a century later, the war is still being waged here, even though more than half the population of 78 million was born after 1975.
Ho Chi Minh and the alluring faces of Western capitalism still confront each other, emblems of Communist Vietnam's celebrated past and of a more complicated future it has not yet decided to embrace. In the capital, Hanoi, a cumbersome, suspicious leadership still hesitates between them, fearing to lose in the global marketplace what it won, at such cost, on the battlefield.
The military geniuses of the Vietnam War, the old fighters whose ingenuity and perseverance defeated a superpower, seem to have been overwhelmed by the challenges — steep challenges by any measure — that confronted them in building a new, independent nation.
By fits and starts over the years they have let in some fresh air, opening the economy somewhat and cautiously allowing more religious and social freedoms. But now they seem to have paused at a crossroads, uncertain, divided and stuck, gripping the reins of political and economic control for dear life, almost frenetic in their stasis.
Under its vigilant leadership, Vietnam today seems like a nation of bees buzzing inside a bottle, thrumming with repressed energy. Many of the same difficulties that drove away foreign investors — along with stifling limits on local business practices — are crippling the efforts of Vietnamese entrepreneurs. And an insistence on government control of major industries serves as a sea anchor slowing economic growth.
"If the government ever got out of the way here, this country would put the rest of Asia to shame," said a Western economic analyst who represents an international aid agency in Hanoi. "Go to the villages. Vietnam defines industriousness."
What he was talking about would amount to a revolutionary step for the Communist leadership, a redefinition of their victory 25 years ago.