Bananas Read online

  Also by Peter Chapman

  The Goalkeeper’s History of Britain

  Copyright © 2007 by Peter Chapman

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  First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Canongate Books Ltd., Edinburgh, Scotland

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84767-194-3 eISBN: 978-0-8021-9200-4

  Canongate 154 West 14th Street New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  To Marie, Alex and Pepe

  Contents

  List of characters

  1 From the Memory of Men

  2 Lament for a Dying Fruit

  3 Roots of Empire

  4 Monopoly

  5 The Banana Man

  6 Taming the Enclave

  7 Banana Republics

  8 On the Inside

  9 Coup

  10 ‘Betrayal’

  11 Decline and Fall

  12 Old and Dark Forces

  Epilogue: United Fruit World

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  List of Characters

  Selected characters in order of appearance:

  Eli Black: Last chief of United Fruit, his suicide in 1975 prompted a furious reaction against the company.

  United Fruit Company: Multi-national colossus, famously known as the ‘Octopus’. Mysteriously disappeared following Eli Black’s death.

  Fidel Castro: Cuban guerrilla, upbringing paid for by United Fruit, which leased land to his father to grow sugar. Seized power in 1959 viewing the company as a ‘grave social problem’.

  Gabriel García Márquez: Nobel Prize-winning author, born in the company’s Colombian banana zone near the time of the 1928 Santa Marta massacre.

  Anastasio Somoza: Dictator of Nicaragua, deposed in 1979, whose family had enjoyed for many years a close confluence of interests with the company.

  Carmen Miranda: Brazilian entertainer. Enjoyed huge popularity in the US during the ‘Good Neighbor’ years of the 1930s and 40s and inspired many in her ‘tutti-frutti’ hat.

  Dr José María Castro: Nineteenth-century president of Costa Rica whose wife, Pacífica, designed the national flag and whose daughter, Cristina, married United Fruit boss Minor Keith.

  General Tomás Guardia: Brought the railroad to Costa Rica in the 1870s and inadvertently opened the way to United Fruit.

  Minor Keith: Keeper of the company store in Costa Rica who went on to lead the company in the early twentieth century as the ‘uncrowned king of Central America’.

  Andrew Preston: Joined with Minor Keith in 1899 and ran United Fruit from its headquarters in Boston, Massachusetts.

  General Manuel Estrada Cabrera: Dictator of Guatemala who seized power in 1898 and ceded much of it to United Fruit six years later.

  Samuel Zemurray: The Banana Man. Organised the Honduran invasion of 1911 and was central to company affairs for over forty years.

  Theodore Roosevelt: US president who shared United Fruit’s expansionist views in the early twentieth century. Argued with the company during the building of the Panama Canal.

  O. Henry: Author, coined the term ‘banana republic’ in 1904 and portrayed US presence in Central America as a life of loveable rogues.

  General Manuel Bonilla: Honduran dictator, deposed in 1907. Restored to presidency by Zemurray afer 1911 invasion.

  Lee Christmas: Led the 1911 invasion of Honduras alongside his colleague Guy ‘Machine-gun’ Molony.

  Woodrow Wilson: US president,1913–21, who crossed swords with United Fruit and its well-bred Boston allies.

  John Foster Dulles: Took a close interest in United Fruit affairs in Central America from the First World War and became its legal adviser. Went on to be US secretary of state in the 1950s when his brother Allen Dulles led the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); both instrumental in the 1954 overthrow of Guatemala’s elected government, which had made enemies of United Fruit.

  General Jorge Ubico: Guatemalan Bonapartist dictator who in the 1930s allowed United Fruit to spread across the Central American isthmus to the Pacific.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt: US president, 1933–45, who wanted to boost trade between the US and Latin America to help alleviate the economic Depression of the 1930s. Furious with United Fruit for its preference for doing business with Nazi Germany.

  General Smedley Butler: Marine, unmasked a big-business plot against President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s. Blamed himself for the ‘rape’ of the Central American republics.

  Edward Bernays: Self-professed propaganda guru, the ‘Father of Public Relations’. Orchestrated 1950s US public opinion for the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected government.

  Senator Joseph McCarthy: US investigator of the 1950s ‘red menace’. Shared the company’s world view.

  President Jacobo Arbenz: Guatemalan leader, adversary of the company and deposed in the 1954 coup. Alleged to be dominated by his radical wife, María.

  E. Howard Hunt: Ubiquitous CIA man whose career closely paralleled that of United Fruit in the 1950s and 60s. Jailed in the 1970s for his role in the Watergate scandal.

  José ‘Pepe’ Figueres: Costa Rican democratic leader who invited United Fruit to pay for his country’s welfare state, and got away with it.

  Jack Peurifoy: Brash US ambassador who supervised the 1954 coup from the Guatemalan end.

  Richard Nixon: US vice-president in the 1950s. Went on to be president and resigned in 1974 as a result of ‘Watergate’.

  Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara: Tried to rally armed resistance to the company in Guatemala before making off to join Fidel Castro’s guerrillas preparing their effort to take power in Cuba.

  John F. Kennedy: US president who assumed office in 1961 and failed, shortly after, to give full backing to United Fruit and others at the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Assassinated in 1963.

  Jimmy Carter: US president,1977–81, who advocated improved human rights in Central America. Regarded at home as a ‘weak’ leader.

  General Omar Torrijos: Panamanian leader and opponent of United Fruit. Negotiated to have the US cede control of the Panama Canal. Died in a plane crash in 1981.

  Ronald Reagan: US president in the 1980s who fought the Cold War’s last battle on United Fruit’s old Central American territory.

  John Negroponte: US ambassador in 1980s Honduras who said he was not turning the country into ‘an armed camp’. Led a successful diplomatic career and came out of retirement for the 2003 Iraq invasion and aftermath.

  1

  From the Memory of Men

  A policeman called to the spot spoke of the selfishness of ‘jumpers’. Locked in their own minds, they didn’t think of anyone ‘down below’. This one killed himself in the Manhattan rush hour and could have taken any number of people with him. Glass fell amid the traffic, the body itself landing near a ramp used by vehicles of an office of the US postal service. Postmen came out to help emergency workers clear up.

  At dawn on Monday, February 3, 1975 a man had thrown himself from the forty-fourth floor of the Pan-American building on New York’s Park Avenue. The ‘jumper’ was soon identified as Eli Black, aged fifty-three and head of United Brands, a large food corporation. A little over five years earlier, after one of the largest ever share deals on the US stock market, Black had taken over the United Fruit Company. He had absorbed one of the most famous – if not infamous – companies in the world into the United Brands group.

  United Fruit’s business was bananas. From bananas it had built an empire. The small states of Central America to the south of the US had come to be known as the ‘banana republics’: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. United Fruit’s reach extended to Belize – former British Honduras – and to Caribbean islands such as Jamaica and Cuba. In South America, Colombia and Ecuador had come under its sway. A company more powerful than many nation states, it was a law unto itself and accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom.

  Why then had Black killed himself? Business was not thriving. A new banana disease had struck United Fruit’s plantations in the early 1970s. The Middle East war of October 1973 had taken its toll on company fortunes: OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries, had multiplied the price of oil several times, which had hit the world as a whole but had had a particular effect on United Fruit. Latin America’s banana-producing countries had set up a cartel of their own: UPEB, the union of banana-exporting countries. UPEB had promptly declared ‘banana war’ on United Fruit to get more money out of the company. From the money it made, United Fruit had always paid the producers the bare minimum. In 1974 nature had taken a hand. Hurricane Fifi had devastated the company’s plantations in Honduras. Hurricanes were an occupational hazard in banana farming but Fifi was o
f unprecedented force – a wind of near biblical proportion. All these factors had contributed to United Fruit’s current malaise.

  Strangely, the business world suggested another dimension to Black’s suicide. Amid the expressions of sympathy at his funeral, in the press and around New York’s financial centre of Wall Street, some wondered whether Black’s ethics had killed him. He was a man of exceptional morality, it was said. A devout Jew, he was from ten generations of rabbis. Thirty years before, Black had been ordained and had served a community in Long Island. He had subsequently ventured into business – he was a brilliant salesman and had made some spectacular deals – but had retained his principles.

  At Christmas 1972 an earthquake in Nicaragua had destroyed the centre of Managua, the capital city. Under Black’s direction, United Fruit was quick to send aid. A popular US cause of the time was the fate of Latin American farm workers, who worked in the US in poor conditions and for very low pay. Black opened negotiations with their unions. Many of his business associates considered him mad for such apparent generosity of spirit. Soon after his death, an article in the Wall Street Journal suggested it might mean there was no place for a person of high moral standards in an uncompromising financial world.

  In 1975 I was a student at the University of Sussex. I am sorry to say that Black’s death struck me as bizarrely comic. The idea of anyone who ran United Fruit occupying the moral high ground seemed absurd. The company’s long history rendered it the ultimate ‘corporate nasty’. It changed governments when it didn’t like them, like the one in Guatemala in 1954 that had wanted to donate some of United Fruit’s unused land to landless peasants. In 1961 United Fruit ships sailed to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba in an effort to overthrow Fidel Castro. As far back as 1928 the company was implicated in the massacre of hundreds of striking workers in Colombia. Gabriel García Márquez had written about the strike in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Born just before the massacre, he had taken the name of his fictional banana zone of ‘Macondo’ from that of a United Fruit plantation near his home in Aracataca.

  In the 1970s, information from Latin America was still surprisingly scant. At the time, I saw television news footage of the earthquake in Nicaragua; I don’t think I’d ever heard the country’s name said before. A man was climbing across the ruins; he was overweight and doing so with difficulty, but he was consoling the bereaved and dispossessed. He was Anastasio Somoza, the president. There had been other Somozas before him and another Anastasio, his son, was waiting to succeed him. The president ran many of Nicaragua’s businesses and it was amazing he had any time to run the country at all. It had already been speculated that he would do well from the anticipated flood of earthquake relief funds.

  Soon after, I caught another programme, a rare BBC documentary on Central America, specifically Honduras. For the first time that I can recall, the United Fruit Company was mentioned. The company, it was reported, had built several hundred miles of railway on its plantations in the distant northeast of the country on the Atlantic coast. The Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, by contrast was on the high central plateau. For many years the city had been promised a railway of its own, and it had duly given the United Fruit Company a lot of land on which to grow its bananas, but the line had never materialised. Tegucigalpa, therefore, was one of the few capitals of the world, possibly the only one, that didn’t have its own railway station.

  As for bananas, I already had some interest because I had spent two months on a banana kibbutz in Israel, on the border with Syria, at the southern reaches of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, and Jordan. Its plantation was a few minutes’ drive by tractor from the kibbutz’s residential buildings, and formed a kind of detached enclave on the outer edges of kibbutz life. It was far nearer the neighbouring Jordanian village and only a few yards from the frontier wire. The banana plants grew to about five metres high, their fronds arching over us to make for a lot of pleasantly refracted sunlight. Mostly, however, the plantation was a sweaty and contained world. Tarantulas and scorpions allegedly lurked in each stem of bananas, though they failed to reveal themselves let alone bite or sting. We were warned against snacking on fallen fruit, especially any with split skin, in case it had received the attention of rats, which, it was said, liberally pissed around in the plantation by night.

  The work involved humping banana stems of some forty kilos each from banana plant to tractor trailer for six hours a day. Just easy enough not to be onerous, it was my first experience of the ‘dignity of labour’. The pay amounted to only a few pence a day but I quite enjoyed being out of the world of money. Not all those with me agreed: ‘fucking communists’, said Irwin, my co-worker from Brooklyn.

  Such experience of the world I took with me to university. With fees paid and a government grant, I went to Sussex, a detached enclave in its own right, its campus carved out of the forest on the English south coast and devoted to theoretical improvement. I did a course in International Relations. When it eventually came to writing my final thesis I chose the case of United Fruit and the banana republics.

  ‘Banana republic’ was a familiar enough term. It had seemed inoffensively jokey, at worst a form of shorthand for political and economic mismanagement, probably with corruption thrown in, plus an element of national dependence on some large external force. It turned out, however, to be a more patronising and derogatory term than I had imagined, at least as viewed by the countries and people to whom it was applied. It was used as if it described their original state, while saying very little of what role any aforementioned large external force may have played in creating or exacerbating their predicament. By its actions, United Fruit had invented the concept and reality of the banana republic.*

  One thing I learned during my research was that such a republic didn’t have to produce bananas to qualify for the title. Nicaragua, for example, did not grow bananas in any great commercial quantity. The country’s banana republicanism resided in the happy coincidence of views enjoyed by the ruling Somoza family, United Fruit and the US. The Somozas had been first to offer their services to assist in both the Guatemalan coup in 1954 and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Washington regarded the Somozas’ army (well-equipped with US arms) and United Fruit as forces for stability that kept Central America subdued.

  By the mid-1970s, when I was writing my thesis, multinational corporations had become a theme of the age. Salvador Allende’s left-wing government had been overthrown in Chile by the armed forces led by General Augusto Pinochet. The International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (ITT), a US company that had big interests in Chile, was thought to be behind it. At the same time, OPEC’s oil price rises had caused crisis around the world, yet the oil companies had emerged with huge profits. Barclays Bank, meanwhile, based in Britain, was making big money out of apartheid in South Africa.

  But in all such corporate practices United Fruit had been there before. In order to price-fix, United Fruit hadn’t troubled with setting up cartels, it just did the job on its own through monopoly control of its market. As for repressive regimes, they were United Fruit’s best friends, with coups d’état among its specialities. United Fruit had possibly launched more exercises in ‘regime change’ on the banana’s behalf than had even been carried out in the name of oil.

  United Fruit had set the template for capitalism, the first of the modern multi-nationals. Certainly there had been other and older big companies, the British East India Company, for example, which had been at its peak in the 1700s. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the East India Company, was a licensed agent of the Crown and dependent on the British Empire. United Fruit knew better: it did things differently and beyond formal imperialism. It could often count on the help of the US government and the CIA but maintained its boast that it had ‘never called in the marines’.