It is too bad Sen. Eddie Markey and his gal-pal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could not have visited Albania in the 1980s. They would have loved it. It was their Green New Deal come true.

There were no cars in Albania. You could not own one, buy one, rent one or steal one.

The communists who ran the country had a long-standing policy that prohibited the private ownership or use of cars. Organized religion had been banned as well.

On rare occasions a dark limousine with shaded windows would come speeding down the main boulevard in Tirana, the capital. There were no red lights or traffic signs, although there were many cops and soldiers on hand.

Fearful pedestrians would surmise that the limo carried Communist Party big-wigs, the only privileged people who had access to cars and chauffeurs. People would look away. But the police and soldiers guarding buildings and intersections would bow and salute the limos as they whisked by.

You never could tell who was riding in the back, perhaps even Hoxha himself. Better be safe than sorry.

Like all communist or socialist dictators, Enver Hoxha, the paranoid Albanian leader, ruled like a fascist. He ruled in fear because, just as he murdered to rise and stay in power, so too could he be murdered.

Also, the lack of access to cars meant that in the Albanian police state the people could be watched easily. You could travel only so far by donkey or by bicycle.

The Sigurimi — the dreaded secret police — always knew where you were. Albania for 44 years, until the communists fell, was a vast prison. You could not get in and you could not get out. And if you ever got anywhere close to the border of Yugoslavia or Greece with escape plans, you would have been shot dead and your family sent to a concentration camp.

Scratch a socialist and you will find a fascist.

But Albania was green. There was no fossil-fuel pollution, and the air was fresh and clean. There was no freedom, either.

The roads, streets and sidewalks were clean as well. There was no litter because there was nothing to buy or throw away. There were no shops, bars, cafes or restaurants. There were no places for people to gather. Parks were green, but there were no people in them.

There was a vast internal spy system in place where neighbors spied on neighbors.

There were no planes, either. Airplanes had been phased out, just the way neo-socialists Markey and Ocasio-Cortez want to see happen in the United States.

The Communists did not want any foreigners in their country. A glimpse of a free American or Westerner might have given them ideas.

The Tirana Airport, surrounded by cornfields, was also green. Even the four Russian MIGs parked in a remote corner of the empty runway were covered in green camouflage.

I flew into the country in August 1986, aboard a 30-seat Saab Fairchild 340 from Zurich that made the bumpy run over the Swiss Alps twice a week. There were four East Germans on board, three Albanians and me. I was the first American newspaperman, working for the Boston Herald, allowed into the country in 30 years. I was granted a visa because Hoxha had died a year earlier and that, I surmised, my parents were born there.

When I arrived, I thought time had stopped. It looked more like 1936 than 1986.

But Albania was not only the cleanest country I had been in, it was also the unhappiest.

I looked out the hotel window on vast Skanderbeg Square in downtown Tirana one early morning. It was eerily empty. No people, no cars, no bicycles, no horses, no donkeys, nothing. At first light people came out of the mist to clean the streets. There was no gas-burning streetsweeper, but a score of elderly women carrying homemade brooms and pails of water. They moved in mesmerizing circles, round and round, ritually sprinkling water on the streets to keep the dust down before sweeping it up.

Everything was free in Albania. The Communists controlled everything, from birth to death — health care, shoddy as it was, education, packed with propaganda, the vast military, which couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag, religion, which was abolished, a free press, which did not exist, and dissident-packed prisons.

The only organization that worked, apart from the Sigurimi, was the band of ancient women cleaning the streets.

But the country was green, green as grass.

Markey and Ocasio-Cortez would have been green with envy.

Email: luke1825@aol.com