Economic systems are much different in the South such as in Saigon (no one really calls it HCMC) where basic free enterprise is the rule rather than the exception.
Danang is the middle zone, which is a mix of communism and capitalism. There’s tension, mixed with freedom, somewhat.
When you’re in Hanoi, you can feel the state, where the freest traders are the souvenir sellers around Hoan Kiem Lake, and even they owe part of their take to the government.
Old Uncle Ho had expressed in his life that he wanted his ashes spread upon hillsides in the North, the Center and the South. But when he died they mounted his corpse like Lenin, in a Soviet style blockhouse in Hanoi - so oddly out of step with Vietnamese architecture - to be periodically shipped back to Russia for touchups.
He’d come a long way from the Vietnam of post-WWII when Vo Nguyen Giap saluted the American flag with the OSS delegation in Hanoi, when Archemides Patti was cabling to Truman that Ho Chi Minh wanted to work with the Americans. But Truman decided that the French could reenter Vietnam as a colony. And the rest is, as they say, history.
The thing is, we’ve seen this before with communist regimes. The first permutation was Lenin and his “New Economic Policy”. Never does it really result in the rulers relinquishing their grip on power; not even in Russia, as we can now see.