It’s not like there is a Cuba War Memorial in Washington. What’s up with that?
Possibly it’s as petty as simply because no one in the US government wanted to normalize relations with the Castros (Fidel and Raul), whereas Ho Chi Min died in 1969.
There are a huge number of Cuban refugees in Florida and elsewhere who vote–and were strongly opposed to reconciliation.
The same situation didn’t happen with Vietnam.
China. Same reason we reconciled with China…because they were a counter to the USSR. What would we have gained by reconciling with Cuba in the past?
One factor is that there probably were more Cuban-Americans who strongly opposed reconciliation than Vietnamese-Americans.
Another is that the men who led Vietnam during it’s war with the United States are long gone.
Maybe this is less important, but Vietnam is currently highly capitalist. Cuba is only slightly capitalist. However, I’m not sure of the economic system in Vietnam when diplomatic relations with the US were reinstated in 1995. Does anyone here know?
This is a good point.
Slightly ironic, though, is that Vietnam is a traditional adversary of China. Note that Vietnam joined with the US in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which can be seen as a counter to China.
We have a higher approval rating (the US that is) in Vietnam than in South Korea or Japan. 
But basically, Vietnam offered the US an opportunity to do the same thing we did with China vis-a-vis the USSR. The US was able to use China as a counter to the Soviet Union, as well as open up opportunities for trade and other regional relationships. We did the same thing with Vietnam wrt China…Vietnam gives us a regional counter that is already wary of China, gives us trading opportunities and actually supports (irony of ironies) a heavier US military presence in the region.
Politically, we really gained nothing by closer relations with Cuba in the past, while the political issues associated with doing it simply weren’t worth it to either party until recently.
The fact that Cuba is ~180 km from the American coast likely had nothing to do with it.
And there are at least as many Vietnamese refugees in California.
It’s a little more than Cuban-American immigrants.
California isn’t a swing state, though.
I’ve long thought the Vietnamese were more Nationalist than Communist, but were willing to spout Communist dogma to get arms to fight the foreigners.
Cuba = Florida = Presidency
Because the Vietnam War ended. Admittedly, it ended in U.S. defeat, but at least there was some sort of closure. With Cuba, OTOH, nothing was ever resolved.
It was then.
Before the collapse Vietnam wasn’t a nearby playground for the rich and raffish. Fidel took that away from them; one can understand congressmen and the rentier class holding a grudge 'til the end of time.
Las Vegas is second-best.
On top of other factors already mentioned, Americans should remember that other countries have their own agency. Vietnam had wanted to resume diplomatic relations for years and had been working for that. Cuba had a much colder attitude towards the United States.
Vietnamese immigrants did not create a highly effective political force in a state essential to presidential elections in which the majority of that opposed reconciliation. There was very little feeling among the Vietnamese immigrants to reject such efforts and they tended to assimilate more than the Cuban emigrés have, so that the smaller number of those who might oppose normalization had less political clout.
The USA political class got stuck in another dumbassed policy from which it couldn’t politically extract itself - witness criminal sentencing, war on drugs, war on terrah, etc, etc.
p.s. answers here imply Florida is no longer a swing state.
I have a lot of Vietnamese friends and have been to Vietnam many times (interestingly in the Army my service just missed involvement in the Vietnam War, so these are were all trips as a private citizen.) There is a small contingent of Vietnamese refugees that diehard hate the Communist government. These were the Southern Vietnamese that never wanted to be Communist, worked with or for the Americans in the South and were also often government employees of the South Vietnamese government.
But what’s happened is this is a small sliver of the total Vietnamese-American community. Because of congressional legislation passed after the war that allowed for a period of very liberal immigration policies toward Vietnamese, most Vietnamese-Americans here today that are first generation immigrants came over as kids in the 80s to 90s, because they had a refugee relative who sponsored them. Again, the policies were very liberal. One family I knew of, the first to come over was a man who would’ve been put in a reeducation camp, he came over right after the war as a refugee. Shortly later he was able to sponsor his wife, his mother and father, his brother, and then after his brother was here for a time he was able to bring his wife and minor children over (he had to leave 3 of his 5 children who were over the age of 18 in Vietnam and has largely never seen them again.) But basically the nature of what’s allowed the Vietnamese-Americans to come over in number is such that only a very small percentage are like the one guy in this family that has a bone to pick with the Communist government. The rest often don’t have strong opinions on the Vietnamese government, they tend to view moving to America as a personal opportunity to have a higher standard of living and quality of life.
Anyway, as a well traveled American who has been to many countries where Americans are controversial or outright disliked, even in Northern Vietnam there just isn’t a lot of anti-American animosity. The Vietnamese perspective was never “we’re at war because we hate America.” They were at war to unify their country and end generations of foreign occupation. This combined with the fact that relatively speaking the government adopted communist-lite/market economy policies fairly quickly after unifying the country meant there really just wasn’t a lot of reason for animosity between our two countries.
Look at it this way, over a million Vietnamese were killed due to our actions in Vietnam. And last I heard Vietnam is the country with the highest pro-American polling in Asia, and maybe even the world. If they can forgive what we did to them it’d be honestly a little ridiculous for us to never renew relations over the 52,000 dead American soldiers. Not to minimize that tragedy of their deaths, but far worse was done to Vietnam than was done to America in that war, and they’ve largely more or less forgotten it. The only places you ever feel any anti-American vibes at all are historical sites, like the places where you can visit the tunnels used by the Viet Cong and such, sometimes the guides in those places have an anti-American vibe.
Also Vietnamese sadly treat any white european looking person very poorly as a tourist, but it’s not related to nationality. They view a white man as being big money, and anything you buy will cost 5x more than what it’s sold to for a native. Unlike many countries where the natives do this as a bartering tactic, most Vietnamese will simply decline to do business with you if you try to barter with them, you pay 500% higher than the local price or you don’t get whatever it is you’re buying. Some of those military historical touring sites for example have “Foreigner Rates” and “Native Rates.” What’s weird is in those places though, if a single foreigner is present, he has to pay the foreigner rate, but his entire tour group gets to go on the “foreigner” version of the tour, which is actually usually much more in depth and shows more of the site. Foreigners also get to come into Vietnam without paying bribes, Vietnamese expats who try to get through customs without a $5 in their passport tend to get scrutinized and delayed.
In my experience (my wife is from a very large Viet-American family that fought with the South Vietnamese and came to the States after suffering reprisals for thier involvement), even Vietnamese-Americans who fled after the war and hate the Communist gov’t are pretty invested in maintaining the personal and financial ties they have with people back in the old country. They travel back and forth to visit frequently, send money back to family members and generally invest a lot of time in keeping abreast of what’s going on with the friends and family they left behind.
As such, their hatred of the Communist gov’t doesn’t extend to an interest in establishing sanctions that would make such activities more difficult, and in all probability do much more to hurt the friends and family members they left behind then do anything to really damage the Communists. As such, there’s never been a strong voting block calling for such sanctions.