ShedSkin
Shed Skin is an experimental compiler, that can translate pure, but implicitly statically typed Python programs into optimized C++. It can generate stand-alone programs or extension modules that can be imported and used in larger Python programs.
For more information, check out http://code.google.com/p/shedskin/
On a simple test I could see a speed improvement of up to 18 times. The great thing is, you can more or less write normal python and then let ShedSkin convert it to C code, so it can get compiled by gcc.
How to use it in scratchbox
Install scratchbox as described in http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/Maemo_5_Final_SDK_Installation Then install Shedskin with "apt-get install shedskin" from the Extras-Devel repository.
There is also a good tutorial of how to use it: http://shedskin.googlecode.com/files/shedskin-tutorial-0.6.html