Lisanka González Suárez

In the 1950’s the Vietnamese shocked the world by toppling French colonialism, during the mid 1970’s they won admiration and interest by defeating the world’s greatest power, despite its formidable military strength. Many military analysts and strategists have wondered how such an outcome, between a small, impoverished country and an economic power such as the United States, was possible. Some overlooked the culture and history of the nation, whose descendants fought for centuries against the French and British, among others, and who knew how to defend their lands, families and natural resources.

President Richard Nixon’s government wrongly believed that the North Vietnamese could be defeated by an attack of "massive and brutal character" on Hanoi.

According to statistics, the U.S. dropped 7,000 bombs on Vietnam, three times more than during the WWII. They said that they were going to send Vietnam back to the Stone Age - Mauro García Triana, first Cuban ambassador to Vietnam, once told me -, increasing their forces to 545,000 men, almost half a million from the Southern Army, in addition to South Koreans, Filipinos, Australians, and Thais, brining the total to more than one million during this critical and decisive period. Vietnam had half a million soldiers, including self defense and village resistance forces.

An eloquent example of this appears in the book The 11 Days of Christmas, by Marshall Michel III - military historian who flew 321 combat missions over Vietnam - when he wrote that the government of Richard Nixon in 1972, believed, "The North Vietnamese would be brought down quickly," with an attack "of massive and brutal character," on Hanoi, a mission which fell to the B-52s, considered to be practically indestructible. However in the first two nights of fighting, eight of these planes were shot down. Over 11 days, 15 B-52s were destroyed and five seriously damaged, with 28 U.S. soldiers killed and 34 captured.

The U.S. carried out a genuine genocide by savagely bombing the then Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

Some cynics began to euphemistically call it a "miracle," disregarding the military strategic intelligence and creativity of the Vietnamese, who were also superior combatants on their land and transformed their rustic weapons into effective traps used against an enemy of superior means and technology.

The world watched as the last invader abandoned Saigon, hanging from the ladder of a helicopter in April, 1975. A year after the city was taken by U.S. forces, the unification of the country was realized under the name of The Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

I remember it to this day, I was barely 20 years old when I arrived at the then Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1966, not knowing if I would live to tell what I had seen, but with the enormous desire to debut as the first female war correspondent for the magazine Verde Olivo, the official publication of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.

After a long journey from Moscow to Peking, and from there to Hanoi, the first thing I noticed flying over the territory, was the similarity between the colors of its countryside with those of Cuba’s. On my way to the capital, after crossing Long Biên Bridge over the Red River, the extreme poverty I saw impacted me greatly, as I became aware of the country’s grave economic situation.

The U.S. employed 545,000 men during the fighting - almost half a million from its Southern Army, in addition to South Koreans, Filipinos, Australians, and Thais - and lost the war.

Once in Hanoi, the first scenes I saw, captivated me and shattered my concept of war. I thought there would be destroyed streets, crossed by trenches and full of soldiers and heavy arms to defend against U.S. planes which had begun their attacks on the country more than two years before. Surely the anguish and terror the city’s inhabitants were experiencing would be clear on their faces. Images I had come to recognize through stories of WWII.

But it was not so. No sad faces, no destroyed streets. The characteristic sounds of a city in motion were softened by music coming from speakers; people walking around unaffected, with typical Asian calm, in particular young couples, hand in hand heading toward the park at Central Lake around which they could enjoy a delicious iced coffee; hundreds of bicycles and a tram full of people circulated on Hanoi’s main avenue, adorned with small flower beds.

Two years had passed since the end of the war against French colonialism and the small nation was suffering multiple problems, the most acute being the reunification of the country. Vietnam had been divided in two, separating the then 17 million people that populated the north from the 15 million who inhabited the South. Families; goods; land; rivers; and mountains, literally separated by an imaginary line.

After defeating the U.S. and reconstructing the country, Vietnam has become one of the Asia’s principal manufacturing powers.

The armed struggle in the South had grown as the only way of fulfilling the 1954 Geneva Accords, which established that elections were to be held two years after the departure of the French from Indochina. This was interrupted by interference from the United States, whose first step, in 1961, was to send a military mission to the South, of almost 400 soldiers, which was gradually increased.

After provoking the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in August 1964, the U.S. was practically defeated in the South, where the struggle had been taking place in earnest. Later the U.S. began to indiscriminately bomb the North, hitting cooperatives, villages, kindergartens, schools, hospitals, pagodas, bridges, ports, factories, "strategic" areas, moving increasingly closer to the capital where children, women, elderly people died: all victims of war.

A few weeks after I arrived in Vietnam, the number of planes shot down over the territory had reached approximately 1000. A few months later I witnessed the first bombing of the periphery of the capital, after many attempts throughout the day and night, preferably at midday, when the Vietnamese take their usual nap.

The bombing intensified and continued after I left Hanoi eight months later, but I was able to see the captured pilots paraded through the streets of the city they had tried to destroy.

39 years after its victory over the U.S., Vietnam once again astounds the world given its great achievements, which has led some to describe as the Vietnamese miracle.

The new Hanoi is 1000 times more beautiful than the city the U.S. attempted to destroy. Pictured is the landmark Keangnam building.

In the 1980’s the process of renovation or Do Moi began; the Vietnamese government implemented innovative and intelligent economic reforms, which led to an extraordinary advance in recent years, with the economy growing more than 3.5 times with sustained and high indices of GDP which has placed the nation among the countries with the lowest levels of poverty, despite its population having increased from between 32-33 million inhabitants to 90 million by 2013, according to estimates.

In a country, still recovering from the wounds of so many years of fighting, with a war economy, practically devastated, there was much to be done, and despite this the Vietnamese never stopped their manufacturing or harvesting their fields.

But by promoting production capacities and, according to experts on the subject, releasing society’s full potential for development, and efficiently utilizing opportunities of globalization to insert itself in the international market, the country has achieved concrete advances on the road to economic development.

This is not a new miracle. Once more the same tenacity, intelligence and courage demonstrated in war and in peace have placed Vietnam in a prominent position among the nations of the continent, with one of the strongest economies in Southeast Asia, in accordance with their specific circumstances and needs and always with a socialist orientation.