I see that Hugo Chavez is calling on all patriotic Venezuelans to shed a few kilos to promote revolutionary health.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and as someone who has fought the good fight against counter-revolutionary muffins and pies, I can sympathize with this latest phase in the progress of Bolivarian Socialism.
But it reminds me of my last encounter with socialist weight consciousness. As a member of the advisory board of Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian relief organization, I visited North Korea back in the 1990’s to see how our shipments of rice were (or were not) being distributed to hungry people. The North Korean officials we met with, and the two minders who went with us everywhere, struggled with the contradictions of their mission. On the one hand, they needed to show us how dire conditions were so that we would continue to send humanitarian aid. On the other, they wanted to show us the many inspiring triumphs of the ever-bright revolution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
About the eeriest thing I saw in the DPRK were the city streets: endlessly wide and straight the great boulevards of the capital opened up views that stretched for miles out to the hills, and in all that distance there wasn’t one car or truck to be seen. Nor were there bicycles. There were, however, pedestrian underpasses on the blocks, and the socialist supermen of the New North Korea dutifully went down the steps and crossed underneath, keeping themselves safe from the non-existent traffic. Even more remarkably, handsome young women in police uniforms and white gloves stood at major intersections, earnestly directing phantom cars.
There were, however, lots of pedestrians, trudging to work — and staying on the sidewalks. I asked our minders why there didn’t seem to be any buses or other mass transit.
“Ah,” he told me. “North Koreans are very health conscious.”
“Yes, and?” I asked.
“Walking to work keeps them in better shape.”
What could be clearer than that? Certainly the last thing you want to do in a famine is gain weight. If you can’t shape up when there’s no food, how will you ever trim those unsightly inches off your waistline?
Hugo Chavez hasn’t had nearly enough time in power in Venezuela to replicate North Korea’s success in this department, or even to match Cuba. (“Why is Castro like an onion?” a Cuban writer once asked me in Havana. “They both make you cry in the kitchen.”) But once Bolivarian Socialism gets beyond the initial stage of occasional food shortages and finally becomes a mature socialist economy capable of producing real hunger on a mass scale, he won’t need any help from the Cubans or the North Koreans in helping his people understand the latest dialectical twist in the road to utopia. Venezuelans may lack material goods, he will be able to explain, but at least the brave new Venezuelan socialists of the future won’t be fat slobs like the oppressed North American masses.