Embalming is a racket even in capitalist countries, where undertakers dupe grieving relatives into paying for the senseless prettification of their loved ones. In communist states the formaldehyde and tweezers serve a more sinister purpose, at the centrepiece of a phoney religion where dead dictators brood over their subjects even in death. So long as they are unburied, their ideas still live.
Although communism preaches equality and atheism, some communists are more equal than others and the top ones wish they could live for ever. So the embalmer’s art is used to defy biology and highlight the difference between ordinary mortals and the ones who boss them around.
To be fair, Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela is not a one-party state. It has no gulag. Chávizmo is