Tin said the Communist Party used Ho's name to justify its own policies as if he were still alive. Over the years, they exchanged poems. And when my father died in April 1955, it was Ho who came to console my family. He arranged the funeral and granted my father's wish that he be buried not in the official cemetery, as befitting a former president of the National Assembly, but in our village. That's the way Uncle Ho was.
Communist propaganda elevates Ho to the status of sage, national hero, saint.
He has become the Strategist, the Theoretician, the Thinker, the Statesman, the Man of Culture, the Diplomat, the Poet, the Philosopher. He has become Ho the Luminary, Ho the Visionary. Peasants in the South build shrines to him. In the North old women bow before his altar, asking miracles for their suffering children. They label him the enemy of the nation, the traitor who sold out Vietnam, the source of all misery.