Banana
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Some of the abandonments seemed to happen as rapidly as in places like Pompeii or the mysteriously empty Maya outposts in the jungles. Though Panama’s Bocas del Toro still served as a shipping point, plantation operations were completely halted. Thousands of acres were left bare, and thousands of workers lost their jobs. In Honduras the huge shipping terminal of Puerto Castilla became a ghost town (a military base now occupies the area; the only remnant of United Fruit’s reign is a falling-down former hospital surrounded by a high fence).
The oddest desertion of all was at Sosua in the Dominican Republic. After the village was left empty in 1940, President Rafael Trujillo offered it as a Jewish homeland—a safe zone at the beginning of the Holocaust. Plans were made to house 100,000 refugees. But the logistics of the plan were never worked out: Only five hundred families actually relocated to the island. Today, twenty-five remain, operating an active synagogue and the country’s biggest dairy operation. Holstein and Jersey cows graze on pastureland that was once United Fruit plantations.
The first drop in banana demand since the founding of the industry came at the start of World War II. Fuel, milk, and meat were rationed, but some supplies were always available since they were produced within U.S. borders. Not bananas. They had to be shipped. Though Central America was free of hostilities, and the plantations could have kept operating at their normal pace, there were no vessels to bring the fruit back home. Most of the Great White Fleet was commandeered by the military. Those ships that continued in private service were forced to make a treacherous journey. German submarines patrolled the area. Cargo vessels traveled in convoys through what had been declared the Eastern Sea Frontier.
The Sixaola had already survived a near-fatal accident. Three years after it was built, it was drafted into service for World War I. The ship could carry 3 million tons of beef on a single transatlantic voyage. In February 1917, as she was being loaded in New York, the Sixaola caught fire. Two crewmen were killed, and the boat half-capsized in its Hudson River berth. After the war, the vessel was raised, refurbished, and returned to transporting bananas.
The Sixaola remained in United Fruit service as World War II began, making voyages from the United States to the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic. The ship’s crew was constantly on edge during these voyages. Twice, the Sixaola was shadowed by German submarines.
The first incident occurred near Cape Race, at the tip of Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. Even in peacetime, the promontory was a place sailors tried to keep away from. It was shrouded in nearly perpetual fog and jutted far into the Atlantic. (A radio beacon at the Cape Race lighthouse was the first to hear a distress call from the Titanic.) Just off the cape, on the night of February 4, 1942, as it traveled from England to New York, the Sixaola’s lookouts spotted a German craft. The U-boat followed the cargo vessel for several hours before veering off. A few days later, the ship—now heading south, along the coast of North Carolina—was chased again. This time, a pair of subs tailed the Sixaola for four hours, finally breaking away just after dawn.
Sinkings of cargo vessels had risen to several a week by the middle of the war. On June 12, 1942, the Sixaola set out from Panama filled with bananas, a shipment of trucks for the U.S. Army, and 201 passengers and crew. It had barely reached the coastline of Guatemala when a pair of German torpedos ripped into the ship’s hull. The banana boat’s captain, William Fagan, gave the abandon ship order two minutes later. Before everyone aboard could get into the lifeboats, the Sixaola’s boilers exploded. Twenty-nine crew members died, including stewardess Edna Johansson; for her sacrifice, she became the first female recipient of the Merchant Marine Combat Bar. Forty-nine survivors not found during the initial rescue were lost at sea for four days before they finally drifted ashore.
“It was terrifying,” the ship’s purser, Emmanuel Zammit, told the Cyber Diver News Network, “with all this debris flying over from the blast in the bow of the ship.” As he waited aboard the lifeboat for rescuers, Zammit heard the rumble of diesel engines; one of the German submarines surfaced directly in front of him. The U-boat’s commander emerged on deck and asked whether the Sixaola was carrying only bananas or whether it was also transporting military cargo. The survivors refused to answer, and the subs were quickly chased away by approaching U.S. military vessels.
NINETEEN GREAT WHITE FLEET SHIPS were sunk during the war. The human cost was high, but for a company as large as United Fruit, the damage was an opportunity to build even larger banana boats. A new Sixaola was christened two years after the war ended. It was painted white, but it was also emblazoned with a new symbol: an emblem that helped ensure the company’s survival, dominance, and place amidst the mainstays of American culture. It was a blue oval, with the name Chiquita at the center.
CHAPTER 22
Brand Name
Bananas
BANANA COMPANIES STILL HAD TO SELL BANANAS, and in a world with thinning supply it was important to each to sell more of its own bananas. There were several banana growers, but once the fruit arrived in markets, there was no way to distinguish whether a particular banana came from United Fruit,* Standard Fruit, or a smaller rival. The largest banana company’s method of increasing sales was to turn the fruit it sold into a brand name. The invention of “Chiquita” involved more than just a simple name. (Initially, the logo was placed on a band that held bunches together. Stickers didn’t come until later.)
In 1944 the company introduced the Chiquita banana jingle, arguably the most well-known advertising melody of all time. The tune was written by the banana company’s advertising agency and was presented by an animated banana, who sang with an exotic accent and wore a bowl of fruit on her head. Miss Chiquita was patterned after Brazilian bombshell actress Carmen Miranda, who had worn a similar costume while she danced seductively amidst a troupe of man-sized bananas in the 1943 musical film The Gang’s All Here. Miranda was frequently addressed in her movies with the Spanish diminutive that the banana company adopted. Chiquita’s tuneful mascot didn’t turn into a “real” woman until a 1967 redesign.
The original Chiquita theme is not the one you hear today. It was performed in a sultry, salsa-influenced style, with lyrics that provided another measure of consumer education:
I’m Chiquita banana and I’ve come to say
Bananas have to ripen in a certain way
When they are fleck’d with brown and have a golden hue
Bananas taste the best and are best for you
You can put them in a salad
You can put them in a pie-aye
Any way you want to eat them
It’s impossible to beat them
But, bananas like the climate of the very, very tropical equator
So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator.
The catchy tune was an instant hit, even if the information it provided was wrong—and a sly way to boost sales: As historian Virginia Scott Jenkins points out, the company that ran dozens of cold-storage rooms across the United States knew that bananas actually last longer when refrigerated.
Today, that little bit of misinformation has been replaced, along with the rest of the song’s lyrics.
I’m Chiquita Banana and I’ve come to say
I offer good nutrition in a simple way
When you eat a Chiquita you’ve done your part
To give every single day a healthy start
Underneath the crescent yellow
You’ll find vitamins and great taste
With no fat, you just can’t beat ’em
You’ll feel better when you eat ’em
They’re a gift from Mother Nature and a natural addition to your table
For wholesome, healthy, pure bananas—look for Chiquita’s label!
The jingle’s melody has been rearranged as well. It is far less sexy, less Latin. If the Gros Michel was a banana with spectacular taste and personality, then the new tune is as plain—and ubiquitous—as the Cavendish that would soon replace it.
teaches you to cook (1947).
CHAPTER 23
Guatemala
SAM ZEMURRAY had retired in 1951, and as with many industrial titans, had turned—perhaps out of conscience—to philanthropy. He helped Wilson Popenoe found his Honduran training facility. With his wife, Zemurray funded a women’s studies professorship at Harvard. He worked to preserve Mayan ruins throughout Central America (Zemurray’s daughter, Doris, was an archaeologist who directed Costa Rica’s national museum in the 1960s). The bootstraps immigrant provided cash to support The Nation, the weekly liberal newsmagazine.
But Zemurray was not quite a former banana baron. He continued to chair the company’s executive committee, and old Sam—the street fighter who, upon taking over United Fruit more than two decades earlier, became known to Wall Street as “the fish that swallowed the whale”—would emerge one final time.
It was 1954. Guatemala.
The small country—Central America’s northernmost, sharing a border with Mexico—was deeply impoverished, with an average life expectancy of under forty years, and deeply dependent on bananas. More than half of the country’s economy was tied to growing, harvesting, and transporting the fruit. Zemurray’s company controlled 75 percent of that trade.
Guatemala had been one of the most important centers of the Mayan empire, and most of the country’s 3 million people were descended from that culture, which had hidden treasures in sacred caves and filled the jungles with towering, intricately carved pyramids. More than just about any other Latin American nation, Guatemala’s native population had suffered since the arrival of the Spanish in the early sixteenth century; for hundreds of years, Mayas—many of whom spoke no Spanish, using instead one of over twenty native dialects—had no civil rights and lived in conditions that were among the most primitive in the Western Hemisphere.
It was a perfect place to grow bananas. United Fruit arrived in the country in the early 1900s, building the town of Bananera near the Caribbean port of Rio Dulce. (Bananera’s are among the oldest continually operating plantations in the world, though they were taken over by Del Monte in 1972. That company still both harvests and funds an agricultural research center there.) Part of the country’s suitability was its terrain and climate. But even more important was the nation’s government—or lack of it. The first Guatemalan president to encounter United Fruit was Manuel Estrada Cabrera, who ruled from 1898 through 1920. Estrada believed his country needed to modernize and invited United Fruit to build the nation’s entire infrastructure; the banana giant constructed telegraph lines, railroads, and seaports. (The only thing the company didn’t build was roads, since highways might be a threat to the train lines that ensured dominance in the banana industry.)
None of these “improvements” benefited the descendants of the Mayas. The country’s ruling Ladino class—those with Spanish lineage—became richer; the poor probably didn’t get poorer (they were already beyond destitute), but village life declined as the plantations were built. Estrada was a modernizer, but, like most absolute rulers—and he soon became one—he also exhibited streaks of imperiousness and ruthlessness. Freedom of the press was abolished. Enemies were executed. The Guatemalan president’s most bizarre caprice was his admiration for Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom. During his rule, he built, with banana money, several Greco-Roman-style temples to her, including one in Guatemala City with the inscription: “Manuel Estrada Cabrera Presidente de la Republica a la juventud estudiosa” (Manuel Estrada Cabrera, President of the Republic, to studious youths).
Estrada was overthrown in 1920. Five more rulers followed, until 1931, when General Jorge Ubico took office. Ubico had won an election but instantly assumed absolute power, changing the country’s laws to give him an unlimited term in office. Ubico’s attitudes toward Guatemala’s peasants were practically schizophrenic. He nursed the country through the Depression, holding town meetings in the indigenous villages and listening so patiently to complaints that people living in the places he visited began to call him “father.” At the same time, Ubico issued edicts that made him, even today, one of the cruelest rulers in Latin American history; he required most Indians to work for landowners—United Fruit owned or controlled the vast majority of Guatemala’s cultivated terrain—for a minimum of one hundred days annually. He created a secret police force. Most notoriously, Ubico passed laws that imposed the harshest penalty on any non-Ladino who failed to follow orders when he was working: The offender could be murdered on the spot.
Like Estrada, Ubico’s ego was tied in with his might—and expressed in bizarre fashion. He imagined that he was the heir, or even the reincarnation, of Napoléon, commissioning paintings and busts of himself for civic buildings and even dressing Guatemalan soldiers in uniforms that resembled those worn by eighteenth-century French troops. He was a believer in numerology: A star with the number five at the center was displayed above the presidential palace on holidays. The pentagram’s points and the numeric symbol were representative of the letters in the dictator’s first and last names. Tomás Borge Martínez, cofounder of the Nicaraguan Sandinista movement, said that the dictator was “crazier than a half-dozen opium smoking frogs.”
Ubico’s rule came at the time Panama disease was hitting Guatemala hardest. As the malady spread into the countryside, United Fruit took possession of so much land that many of its tracts were considered nations within a nation. The fruit company was allowed to undervalue the land it owned, and the stated worth of its holdings were so low that it didn’t have to pay taxes.
Ubico’s biggest enemy was Communism. He “saw Communist conspiracies everywhere,” historians Marcelo Bucheli and Geoffrey Jones observe. In addition to detaining and sometimes killing anyone perceived as having connections with a labor movement, Ubico also banned—meaning they couldn’t be written or spoken—words and phrases like trade union, strike, and petition. Ubico’s attempt to control his nation’s vocabulary climaxed when he banned the word workers. From that point on, whether you were a street sweeper or a banana picker, you were to be called—and only called—an employee.
Guatemala, wrote the New York Times, was a “big, private madhouse.” The residents of that madhouse were a banana company desperate for new land, a dictator who opposed any form of organization for impoverished workers, and a world that, by 1944, was quickly polarizing into West and East, capitalist and Communist, American and Soviet. Guatemala was about to explode.
IF THE COUNTRY WAS A TIME BOMB, the fuse was lit in an unexpected way. Since Ubico took power, a new group had emerged in Guatemala: a middle class. Though they had comfortable lives, they resented the fact that their nation was, in most respects, little more than a giant, foreign-owned banana plantation. The first strikes began with schoolteachers. Throughout 1944, more and more ordinary Guatemalans filled the streets of their cities despite Ubico’s attempts to banish even the language of rebellion from his citizens’ minds. The government response was typical. Soldiers were called in, and the demonstrators were fired upon. But this time—in a world that was successfully beating back the forces of fascism—the violence turned into a catalyst: The strikes and protests expanded. In July, Ubico attempted to maintain his grip by “resigning,” naming a loyal crony as his successor. The puppet regime was forced to call for elections but held on to power by jailing opposition candidates and reserving control over the military. As long as it maintained that grip, Ubico and his allies would remain in power, and Guatemala would remain a banana republic.
THE GUATEMALAN GENERALS DIDN’T CRUMBLE. They succumbed to a surprise attack. The army’s junior officers had been discontented since late June, when forces loyal to Ubico fired on protesters in Guatemala City, killing María Chinchilla, a grade school teacher. The battle began in October, at Fort Matamoros—the headquarters of the nation’s military, located at the geographic center of Guatemala City. A pair of young soldiers, Captain Jacobo Arbenz (a former schoolteacher) and Major Franci
sco Arana, spear-headed the effort. Seventy students were surreptitiously brought into the military base. Within minutes, they’d killed the high-ranking officers who supported the government and gained control of much of the base’s heavy artillery. A battle between loyalists and the rebelling soldiers and students ensued; twelve hours later, Fort Matamoros had been completely destroyed, 1,800 loyalists and rebels were dead, and the government had fallen. Ubico’s hand-picked replacement, General Francisco Ponce, resigned. He left, along with his patron, for exile in Mexico. Arbenz and Arana quickly called for elections; a university professor named Juan José Arévalo gained the presidency in 1945. It was the beginning of what Guatemalans call Los Diez Años de la Primavera, “The Ten Years of Springtime.”
Despite Arévalo’s reforms—he allowed political parties and press freedom, and for the first time term limits were imposed on elected officials, including the president—the lives of banana workers changed little. United Fruit controlled the countryside, and changes in labor practices, such as the legalization of trade unions, specifically excluded those working on plantations. Arévalo attempted to improve living standards nationwide by building schools, hospitals, and enacting social welfare programs. He had already attracted the suspicious attention of the United States by describing himself as a “spiritual socialist,” which meant that he hoped to liberate the minds of the peasants, even if their physical lives were still, for the moment, tightly controlled by outside interests. It hardly mattered that Arévalo also listed his idols as Abraham Lincoln and FDR.