Venezuela Today
Soviet-style humor is finding a new life in Venezuela, where joking can be a way to criticize the
government.
In late November, I found myself at an
emphatically chic hotel bar in Caracas. I was there for a large gathering that had technically started
an hour earlier, but I sat alone, a victim of my own near-punctuality. To
fill the time, I began a conversation with the friendlier of two bartenders,
a fellow who clearly preferred speaking to conversing and who, with a
practiced spontaneity, segued seamlessly from taking my order to telling this
joke:
An old man walks into a grocery store in Caracas. After waiting patiently in line, he asks the shopkeeper for a
container of cooking oil, a jug of milk and, a quarter kilo of coffee. The
clerk apologizes, saying that all three items are out of stock, and the
disappointed patron walks off. Overhearing this exchange, the next person in
line remarks to the proprietor: “Cooking oil? Milk? That stupid old man, he
must be crazy.” The storekeeper considers this a moment and responds: “Yes,
but what a remarkable memory!”
What struck me most about the joke was that
I’d heard it before, over a decade earlier, in the Czech Republic, from a gruff reformed communist. I’d gone to Eastern Europe as an exchange student,
to learn about transitions away from socialist economics—an invaluable skill
set (or so I believed) for when Hugo Chávez’s revolution
inevitably floundered, and my generation of
foreign-educated Venezuelans was called upon to rebuild the country. This was
2003, when Chávez was still consolidating his power. Since that time, I’ve
both endured and chronicled the entrenchment of the country’s misfortunes:
its overnight arbitrage fortunes for the well connected, its rampant
shortages and interminable lines for the rest. Yet the bartender’s joke was
the most explicit echo of Soviet-era Europe that I’d experienced in Venezuela.
He soon told me another:
An Englishman and a Frenchman are at a museum,
admiring a Renaissance work depicting Adam, Eve, and the apple in Eden. The Briton observes that Adam sharing the apple with his wife
shows a particularly British propriety. The Frenchman, unconvinced, counters
that the pair’s obvious comfort with their nudity clearly marks them as
French. A passing Venezuelan, overhearing, remarks candidly, “Sorry to
intrude, caballeros, but these are obviously Venezuelans: they have
nothing to wear, practically nothing to eat, and they are allegedly in Paradise.”
This joke, too, has a Warsaw Pact pedigree. It
can be found on the Internet in numerous iterations, with only the final
character’s nationality changed—to Soviet, Cuban, even North Korean
. (The Englishman and Frenchman, to their
credit, remain largely static.)
These life-under-Marxism jokes, known as anekdoty
to Russians during the Cold War, became an increasingly vital outlet for
criticism during the period immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet
system. The genre has changed little since those days, but it has travelled,
seamlessly transcending culture and geography to underscore certain
commonalities of revolutionary Marxist systems (scarcity, triumphalist
propaganda, bungling government bureaucracies) and, sometimes, to highlight
the amalgam of cleverness, patience, indignation, and despair with which
people respond to such conditions.
That these are features of life in today’s Venezuela is incontrovertible. Even the usually Panglossian government
media no longer seems to deny Venezuelans’ hardships, having shifted from the
official line that the C.I.A. is carrying on a “media war,” aimed at bringing
down the revolution with lies, to the idea that the C.I.A. is carrying on an
“economic war,” aimed at toppling the government through manufactured
scarcity and fake lines full of agents provocateurs. The Venezuelan economy
relies excessively on petrodollars, and the country’s government has been
funnelling oil rents into imports of the food, medicine, and other basic
goods that it is incapable of producing internally. Having neither diversified
economically nor saved much during years of high oil prices, Venezuela was already in recession even before those prices collapsed
last year. Loath to admit defeat and officially devalue its fixed currency,
or to abandon popular subsidies such as penny-priced gasoline, the government
has remained mostly solvent by printing money to cover its domestic
obligations, enforcing onerous price controls, and being increasingly
tight-fisted with access to foreign currency. This has come at the cost of
stratospheric inflation and harrowing shortages of basic goods. The appeal of
Soviet-style humor in the face of such problems is obvious.
In 2008, the documentary filmmaker Ben Lewis
published “Hammer and Tickle,” a remarkable collection of jokes amassed from the former Soviet bloc. The book also
provides a survey of the role humor played in European communism, building a
case, albeit mostly through anekdotal evidence, that humor played a
fundamental role in the downfall of that system. Alas, Lewis restricts
himself almost entirely to the Soviet sphere. In a lonely paragraph
addressing the rest of the world, he shrugs off the Chinese, Vietnamese, and
Cambodians, arguing that none of them “appear to have expressed their
experiences of Communism this way”—presumably they did so by means other than
joke telling. Cuban jokes, in his view, focus more on insulting Castro
personally than on the bleakness of life within the system. Where true
life-under-Marxism jokes exist in Cuba, Lewis writes, they are rehashed from the Soviet experience,
and may not be “genuine expressions” of the citizenry.
I would argue otherwise. The adoption of one anekdot
over another taps into something deeply authentic: a spectral snapshot,
suitably blurry, of the zeitgeist in a particular place. For Venezuelans, the
jokes’ focus on certain aspects of life—scarcities, corruption, propaganda,
and mummified ex-leaders come to mind—reveals something about the state of
the country’s revolution and the current concerns of its people. A gag about
the absence of cooking oil and milk takes root in Caracas at a given moment,
while another joke, about totalitarian extremes—say, the one where a frantic
rabbit flees a secret-police crackdown on camels (“I know, but you try
explaining that to the secret police!”)—never gains traction.
Or at least, it never used to gain traction. I
still haven’t heard a frantic-rabbit joke in Caracas, but I wouldn’t be surprised if something like it has become
more popular there since Nicolás Maduro came to power, in 2013. Say what you
will of the late Chávez’s faults: a lack of confidence wasn’t among them. He
frequently countenanced criticism, returning it as good as he got it. Maduro,
by contrast, has proven gaffe-prone and insecure, and has injected a new
paranoid severity into Venezuela’s revolution. A new law was recently passed that authorizes the
use of “potentially deadly” force, including live ammunition, to maintain
order. And political detentions are now tragically common—February’s arrest,
by SEBIN intelligence-service
police forces, of the Caracas metropolitan mayor Antonio Ledezma, on conspiracy charges, is
the most recent high-profile example. Maduro has likewise sought to impose
silence as best he can, increasing censorship of the country’s cartoonists,
editorialists, and TV satirists. (My own column, for El Universal, was
among those recently terminated.) Whether or not such moves are shaping the
nature of the jokes being told in Venezuela, they have had the effect of leaving the form as perhaps the
safest outlet for humor critical of the government.
There’s no real way of telling if the
subversive joke-telling has grown more pervasive, but I did hear about one
making the rounds recently whose characterization of the revolution felt like
an indicator of sorts. When I consulted with Francisco Toro, a blogger
and former freelance newspaper correspondent
in Venezuela, about this piece, he told me that he’d just heard a joke whose
origins he figured were Soviet:
Two men are waiting in a food queue and one of
them finally snaps. “That’s it,” he announces, “I’m sick of lines, and I’m
off to shoot Nicolás Maduro.” With that, he storms off, only to return an
hour later, and jostle back into his former spot. “Well, did you do it?” asks
his companion. “I couldn’t,” the man says. “The line to kill Maduro was even
longer than this one.”
Indeed,
in the former U.S. national-security advisor Brent Scowcroft’s memoir, “A
World Transformed,” (which is co-authored by George H. W. Bush), he recounts
hearing the same joke told about Mikhail Gorbachev during the last days of
the Soviet Union—by none other than Gorbachev himself. During Gorbachev’s
era, life-under-Marxism jokes were seen by many as a bellwether of the
sturdiness of the Soviet regime. In this belief, as European communism was
entering its period of final decline, Ronald Reagan had the State Department
compile lists of the jokes being told by Eastern Europeans so that he could
use them himself. He told this one, about purchasing an automobile in the Soviet Union, during a 1988 speech:
This man, he laid down his money. And then the
fella that was in charge said to him, “Okay, come back in ten years and get
your car.” And he said, “Morning or afternoon?” And the fella behind the
counter said, “Well, ten years from now what difference does it make?” And he
said, “Well, the plumber is coming in the morning.”
The current wait for a new car in Venezuela is only around four years, but Venezuelans’
patience with the system does appear to be rubbed raw. With the country’s
economic model seemingly continuing its inexorable disintegration,
pro-government media have tried to placate the populace with think pieces
purporting to explain why waiting in line is actually good for you, and have
lauded the state’s creation of a new Vice Ministry of Supreme Social
Happiness, but the results have been underwhelming. According to a survey
conducted in December by the polling firm Datanálisis,
eighty-six per cent of Venezuelans currently think that the country is off
track, and only twenty-three per cent approve of Maduro. Meanwhile, YouTube
videos showing barren shelves
, people stampeding
for scarce products, and angry outbursts
from those in line (particularly when the well-connected attempt
to skip ahead
) circulate widely, even beyond
the opposition’s traditional middle-class base.
It has long been
an exasperated mantra among critics of the revolutionary regime that
Venezuelans should stop laughing at their misfortunes and actually do
something about them. From jokes to polls, there are signs that this motion
is taking place.
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