The logo of the Miss Universe Organization
Across the world, Venezuela is known for its twenty-first century socialism and its obsession with beauty. On consecutive days, these two pillars of Venezuelan society made international news, with President Nicolás Maduro seizing stores of the Daka electronics chain, and María Gabriela Isler becoming the country’s seventh Miss Universe at the ceremony in Moscow.
Both events were sources of pride for Venezuelans and the government, but their antithetical political and ideological bases underscore the paradoxes at the heart of Venezuela’s national consciousness.
On Friday Maduro ordered the takeover of the Daka stores, which he accused of inflating prices and overcharging customers. Privately-owned Daka’s crime was raising the price of its goods by as much as 1,000% compared to the rates charged by state-run providers.
During his speech on Friday Maduro continued to blame the country’s ‘bourgeois parasites’ for looting ordinary Venezuelans, before invoking his audience to go to the Daka stores and make the most of the government-adjusted prices. He affirmed that these villains want to ‘wage war on the people’ and ensure they go hungry.
The ceremony in Moscow had all the usual glamour of a Miss Universe contest
But just a day after Maduro’s latest diatribe against the rich, big business and neoliberalism, Venezuela continued its recent dominance of the annual Miss Universe awards, with its third title in six years.
Moreover, that Venezuela continues to pride itself on success in a contest acquired in 1996 by US billionaire businessman Donald Trump, and now co-owned with major commercial broadcaster NBC, sits awkwardly with its designs to become a socialist utopia and a paradigmatic scourge of US imperialism.
The Miss Universe contest exudes glitz, opulence and wealth. To use just one example, at the final, Italian designer Yamamay unveiled part of its Miss Universe range, an emerald, ruby and diamond swimsuit valued at $1m.
National pride at its triumphs, quite naturally, sugars the capitalist pill Venezuelans have to swallow when celebrating Miss Universe awards, and in a country so obsessed by physical beauty, its acquiescence with such an event is understandable, even though clearly contradictory to the leitmotifs of the Bolivarian socialist revolution.
Not all Venezuelans are convinced Chavistas, and many can legitimately support the contest without compromising their political philosophies. Moreover, although it is at odds with Maduro’s ideology, he wasted no time in congratulating María Gabriela Isler on Twitter, affirming that ‘your triumph is the triumph of Venezuela’.
Venezuela’s enigmatic relationship with international beauty pageants run from the big business of the ‘empire’ and which promote many themes anathema to its government highlights the paradoxes of Venezuela’s acceptance and application of Bolivarian socialism.
After a bloody, hard-fought election in April emphasised Venezuela’s polarised society, another success at the Miss Universe awards exposed a fundamental discontinuity between its socialist program and its overarching concern to cement its renown for physical beauty.