The Straits Times. May 10, 2000
Cuba will help turn the historic Ho Chi Minh Trail into a national highway, enhancing the link between the north and south at a cost of $650 million
HANOI -- Cuban engineers have returned to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, Vietnam's famous wartime supply route, to help turn it into a new national highway, transport ministry officials said on Monday.
The engineers from Cuban-Vietnamese joint venture construction firm VIC started work over the weekend on a key 90-km section of the new trunk road in the mountainous central provinces of Quang Binh and Quang Tri, the officials said.
Twenty-seven years ago in 1973, Cuba had sent a company of 13 engineers during the last stages of the Vietnam War to concrete the same section of the trail.
This is to facilitate the southern advance of soldiers from north Vietnam in a triumphant 55-day offensive which brought the conflict to a close two years later.
The Cuban engineers hope to complete the first 11 km from Ben Quan to Ben Tat before next year's wet season and to finish the whole section before the 2002 monsoon.
The government plans to use the new highway as a relief road for the coastal Route One highway which is the country's only north-south trunk road and is regularly cut by seasonal flooding of the narrow coastal strip.
Under the plan approved by Prime Minister Pham Van Khai to mark last month's 25th anniversary of the end of the war, the government hopes to complete the first 347 km of the 1,690-km highway by 2003 at a cost of US$378 million (S$650 million).
It is a far cry from the ambitious super-highway project put forward by Mr Khai's predecessor Vo Van Kiet in 1997 and rejected by parliament as overly ambitious for a country of Vietnam's means.
But the plans is still criticised by foreign diplomats here who say the money would be better spent on upgrading the existing highway than on trying to revive memories of military triumphs more than a quarter of a century old.
During the war US planes dropped thousands of tonnes of ammunitions on the 16,000-km network of paths, tunnels and canals that made up the Ho Chi Minh trail without ever completely cutting it.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has been left as one of its last remaining ideological soulmates. -- AFP
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