UPDATE - Vietnam mourns death of Castro

UPDATES WITH CHINA VISIT, ADDS PHOTOS

By Bennett Murray

HANOI (AA) - Vietnamese leaders continue to mourn the death of Fidel Castro four decades after ideological alignment and a mutual nemesis brought the two nations together.

At a ceremony held at the Cuban embassy in Hanoi, Vietnamese Communist Party elders fondly recalled the late Cuban president.

“For Vietnam, Cuba is willing to devote blood,” Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trọng, Vietnam’s de-facto head of government, wrote in the funeral book, reported the state-run Vietnam News Agency late Monday night.

The mourning, however, is yet to finish. Dec. 4 will be officially observed as a day of mourning across Vietnam which, along with Cuba, is one of the world’s last remaining communist states.

On the surface today, the countries bear little resemblance.

Vietnam, while retaining the constitutionally-mandated dominance of the Communist Party, embraces a booming private sector, while in Cuba one barely exists.

And while Vietnam and the United States have largely buried the hatchet since normalizing relations in 1995, a rigid U.S. trade embargo against Cuba dating back to President Dwight Eisenhower’s times remains in place.

From the 1950s through the end of the Cold War, however, Cuba and Vietnam were much in the same geopolitical camp.

Both underwent successful leftist revolutions, first with Ho Chi Minh’s 1954 victory over the French colonialists and then Castro’s putsch against Dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959.

While Cuba and the U.S. never fought a prolonged war, Castro’s government was a vocal supporter of Hanoi during its war in the 1960s and 70s against the U.S. and its puppet regime in South Vietnam.

Castro even personally visited war-torn Quang Tri province in 1973 only months after the U.S. withdrawal following the Paris Peace Accords.

In an often-told story, Castro was said to have evacuated a 17-year-old volunteer in his car after she was wounded by an explosion while clearing bomb craters within eyesight of the Cuban revolutionary.

While the modern-day Vietnamese Communist Party moves increasingly close to Washington -- Hanoi was a signatory to the U.S.-initiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal -- Castro’s death has brought fond memories of old Cold War socialist solidarity to the surface.

Meanwhile, incoming U.S. President Donald Trump has said he will abandon U.S. involvement in the TPP upon assuming the presidency, calling the deal the “death blow for American manufacturing”.

On Tuesday, China's President Xi Jinping -- the general secretary of the Communist Party of China -- paid a visit to the Cuban embassy in Beijing to mourn the passing of Castro.

Although both Cuba and China were functioning Communist states, China fell out with long time Cuba ally the Soviet Union over different interpretations of Marxism-Leninism.