Saigon by Any Other Name Is Still Saigon : Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City retains a brash and bawdy character amid celebrations of late president’s 100th birthday.

If Uncle Ho could be in this city named for him as it celebrates his 100th birthday, Vietnam’s late president and revered revolutionary would not be pleased.

For weeks now, this sprawling metropolis has been paying homage to him with ceremonies and celebrations marking the May 19 birthday of the unassuming little man who could not abide hero worship, particularly when directed at himself.

So, he probably would have been irked, or at least embarrassed, to learn that his adulators planned to unveil a new statue of him in front of City Hall on the big day.

At a time when Communist leaders elsewhere in the world are being found to have feet of clay, Uncle Ho’s reputation is unthreatened in this city.

If many of the entrepreneurial Saigonese did not embrace his fervent Marxism, they could admire Ho as a nationalist hero who led the fight to unify Vietnam.

The Communist regime’s beloved Uncle Ho probably would not have been surprised or displeased to find that most who live in this former South Vietnamese capital still call it Saigon, although it was renamed for him soon after the Communist victory in 1975.

And if Saigon has been somewhat slow to adapt to communism, Ho probably would have understood. He was wise enough to know that it requires more than a new name to change the character of a city.

Still brash and bawdy, Saigon remains Saigon.

The city’s daily newspaper is called Saigon. A local beer is named Saigon Export. American GIs no longer cruise Tu Do Street in search of booze and sex, but money still talks in Saigon, where one still can buy French champagne, Russian caviar and Cuban cigars.

There is dancing nightly in Saigon’s hotels, where the Japanese elevators work just fine.

Gone are the bar girls who demanded, “You buy me Saigon tea,” but when the dancing stops, sex is still sold.

As in the war years, the heart of the city still is afflicted with beggars. Many of them are Amerasians fathered by Americans long gone. Some of the mixed bloods are now siring children of their own.

Addicts on the street inject each other with liquefied heroin.

The Saigon Floating Hotel, docked downtown on the Saigon River, has doormen decked out in French-style sailor suits trimmed with pastel green. The Communist regime hopes that the posh hostelry, towed from Australia, will earn desperately needed foreign exchange.

The great majority of Saigonese suffer the grinding poverty that afflicts the rest of the nation.

As elsewhere in Vietnam, many in Saigon contend that support for the Communist Party is eroding because its members and government officials are corrupt and have deviated from Ho’s principles.

The local press has reported misconduct by party leaders and police officials in Saigon that led to the closing of a restaurant that allegedly provided them with sex as well as food.

Meantime, up north in Hanoi, Vietnam’s leaders finally decided last summer to release the last testament of Uncle Ho, who died in 1969, six years before reunification.

A politburo communique admitted that Ho’s successors had ignored his wish to be cremated. It said the party had decided to preserve his remains so that “southern compatriots and international friends might have a chance to visit the uncle.”