Banana

by Dan Koeppel

  Two more candidates remained, and both were promising. The Bout Rond banana, first grown in Puerto Rico, was tasty, ripened well, and looked like Gros Michel. Bout Rond had one characteristic that made it an especially good choice as the Gros Michel plantations thinned: It could be planted in the same fields, gradually replacing the older variety, requiring no changes in infrastructure. But, like every other potential Gros Michel successor, other qualities were lacking. The fruit withstood Sigatoka poorly, it could bruise and rot easily in cargo holds, and it didn’t like cool temperatures. In the field, Bout Rond banana plants blew down easily in high winds. Because of these problems, the Bout Rond stood little chance of replacing the entire Latin American banana crop.

  But the Bout Rond, Lacatan, and other small-scale bananas Standard Fruit experimented with weren’t just abandoned because they were inadequate. By 1958 they were no longer needed. That second candidate—the one that eventually won the race—was Cavendish.

  CHAPTER 26

  Embracing the New

  UNITED FRUIT KNEW WHAT THE CAVENDISH WAS. They hated it. Thomas McCann, who’d spent over twenty years working as an image-maker for the banana giant—he was the one who allegedly helped distribute phony photographs of dead bodies to the press during the Guatemalan war—wrote in his 1976 memoir that the company believed the Cavendish, along with any company that sold them, would be “thrown out” of supermarkets across the nation. The company that invented banana innovation—and had therefore invented the modern banana—had become hidebound, lumbering, and unable to change.

  Instead of seriously considering a replacement banana, the largest banana company cracked the whip on its workers—enforcing strict quotas on productions, trying to squeeze every last Gros Michel out of every last acre of plantation.

  Standard Fruit couldn’t afford to do that. In 1939 sample Cavendish plants were imported to Honduras from Santos, Brazil, where they’d been grown for local consumption. Wartime interrupted the test, but by 1947 the company began exports of the Giant Cavendish banana.

  Turning the Cavendish into a Gros Michel replacement was not a sure thing. The Cavendish had advantages over the original commercial banana: It was entirely resistant to Panama disease and, unlike the Bout Rond, held up fairly well in hurricanes. The Cavendish was susceptible to a host of maladies—everything from the Sigatoka fungus to bacterial infections, along with caterpillars, aphids, and beetles—but these were mostly controllable. And because the Cavendish plant wasn’t as tall as the banana it would ultimately replace, it was easier to saturate with Bordeaux mixture.

  THE CAVENDISH ALSO LOOKED and tasted right. A ripe Cavendish wasn’t exactly the same, either in the hand or on the palate, as Gros Michel. But it was close—close enough.

  With the Sigatoka fungus, bacterial infections, and pests under control, there was only one—huge—problem. The Cavendish that resisted the most virulent enemy its species had was, in another way, a fragile thing. Gros Michel bunches could be thrown in cargo holds and shipped on rough seas without bruising or breaking, as long as they were kept cool. As we know from the mushy spots that appear after a mild jostling in our grocery bags, the Cavendish is nowhere near as hardy.

  Without another option, Standard Fruit’s engineers tried to find a way to make the Cavendish travel better. What they accomplished, in the decade following World War II, was a revolution. They reinvented the banana industry.

  TODAY, THAT SOLUTION appears so simple that it almost seems laughable: Ship the Cavendish not on stems but in boxes. Doing so, however, required a complete overhaul of an infrastructure that had been built up for over half a century. While United Fruit’s CEO was busy attending mass at New York’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral with Guatemalan president Carlos Castillo Armas, and the company’s official policy was still to drench plantations across Central America, Standard Fruit was making the Cavendish work. Historian John Soluri points out that the smaller grower, despite calling boxed fruit “the greatest innovation in the history of the banana industry,” didn’t invent the process. It had previously been used in the Canary Islands. Nevertheless, Soluri writes, “boxed fruit marked the beginning of a new phase in export banana production and marketing.”

  After numerous tests, Standard determined that an ideally sized banana box would be a little larger than a milk crate, capable of holding forty pounds of fruit. In order to get the fruit into the cartons, it now had to be processed in the field, at packing houses built for that purpose. This decentralized preparatory step meant that fruit was better shipped in trucks, by road. That development would ultimately spell the end of the Central American railroads that had put United Fruit in business in the first place. Boxed fruit was also easier to deliver. In orderly stacks, ripening and cooling became more efficient. Codes on the banana boxes meant that the journey of a particular load of fruit could be tracked from plantation to grocery shelf.

  Boxing yielded another hidden advantage: Since bunches were broken up and handled individually, they could also be branded more efficiently as consumer products. Grocers had previously sold Gros Michel by hanging entire bunches of the fruit, straight from distributors, in their stores. Now they could arrange individual hands into attractive, modern supermarket displays. Standard Fruit launched its newly boxed fruit under the brand name “Cabana Banana” and began applying stickers to individual fingers as they were placed into boxes at the packing house.

  The empire built by Andrew Preston, Minor Keith, and Sam Zemurray was falling apart. United Fruit’s profit dropped from $66 million in 1950 to $33.5 million in 1955 and to just $2.1 million in 1960. By then, Sam the Banana Man’s power had diminished. The former mogul died from Parkinson’s disease a year later. A new chief executive, Thomas Sunderland, took power. His first order: adopt the Cavendish.

  THOUGH IT ARRIVED LATE, United Fruit was a quick study, copying every technique its smaller rival had developed. It began testing Cavendish varieties in 1960, initially settling on a type known as Valery. By the mid-1960s, the changeover was complete. The switch remade United Fruit. In an effort to “reintroduce” itself to American consumers, the company launched one of the most successful marketing campaigns in American history. It changed its mascot from a female-like singing fruit into a musical, wiggling, and busty señorita. Like Standard Fruit, it began putting stickers on individual bananas.

  The final Gros Michel bananas to reach the United States were sold in 1965. By then, the entire industry had transformed. Working conditions improved (though they still were far from perfect). United Fruit began to sell much of the land it had taken over during the previous seventy years: The policy of direct control that had driven the company for decades had ultimately failed to either stop disease or please governments. Today’s banana industry, with U.S. companies purchasing fruit from local subcontractors, who actually own and operate the plantations, emerged. That market diversification allowed Standard Fruit to compete on a more equal footing. Energized by its success with the Cavendish, it began to catch up to its rival.

  CHAPTER 27

  Chronic Injury

  THE DAMAGE UNITED FRUIT had done to Latin America was beyond imaginable and, even as the Cavendish shift occurred, beyond healing. The dictatorial governments the company installed in Guatemala and Honduras ruled their respective countries for decades, releasing wave after wave of abuse, assassination, and even genocide. In Guatemala, death squads sponsored by the successors to banana-installed governments roamed the countryside, killing anyone suspected of being—or even becoming—a left-wing sympathizer. That meant just about anyone who labored on a banana plantation, and their families. It was the obscene, logical extension to the sentiment that had crushed Jacobo Arbenz and his efforts to bring justice to the country’s banana lands. Over 100,000 native Mayas died at the hands of the Guatemalan military; tens of thousands more fled the country (most now live in the United States).

  Jacobo Arbenz never recovered from his defeat. In his years of exile, he’d become a
stateless vagabond. Half-naked and humiliated, he’d first flown to Mexico City, where the leader he’d deposed, Jorge Ubico, was also exiled. Mexico was a U.S. ally, and Arbenz—along with his wife and daughter—was soon asked to leave. Arbenz’s father was Swiss, and that country was the next to shelter him, but said that he could stay only if he renounced his Guatemalan citizenship. Arbenz refused to deny his allegiance to the country he’d worked to free.

  Eastern Europe seemed promising, but the only country that would take him was Czechoslovakia. Even though it was behind the iron curtain, Prague felt cosmopolitan, accessible. But the government there was unable to provide Arbenz with housing or the money he needed to take care of his family; unlike other fleeing dictators, the Guatemalan had not escaped with briefcases or foreign bank accounts filled with looted cash. There seemed to be just one place left to go: the Soviet Union, the country he’d been accused of conspiring with. His arrival in Moscow confirmed, for much of the world, that the U.S. action in Guatemala had been correct. But Soviet officials were less than welcoming. They refused to allow Arbenz to see his family.

  What Arbenz really wanted was to go home—or at least to get closer. His native country was out of the question, but as time passed, he believed some other Latin American nation might agree to host him. The conditions offered by Uruguay were less than attractive—he couldn’t hold a job or speak out politically, and was required to report in to the national police weekly—but it was the only offer he received. It was three years after the coup. Nothing was going right. His daughter, Arabella, became moody and depressed. His wife, Maria Cristina Vilanova—who was so passionately committed to the reforms her husband had advocated that she’d allowed her family’s own estate to be returned to the peasants—felt helpless and tired.

  In 1960, finally, there was hope. Revolution in Cuba had brought Fidel Castro to power. Though Arbenz’s decision would again be seen as confirmation of his Communist leanings, and he knew there was a huge difference between himself and the dictator, Arbenz accepted Castro’s offer of permanent, unrestricted asylum.

  Finally, Arbenz might have peace, if not happiness.

  Arabella, just fifteen years old, refused to go. She protested when her parents tried to send her to what she saw as elitist private schools but also refused to join any Communist youth groups. As her mother and father settled in Cuba, she left for Paris, proclaiming that she’d become an actress.

  Arbenz still dreamed of returning to Guatemala. He’d promised, in his last radio address, that “obscured forces which today oppress the backward and colonial world will be defeated.” Instead, his defeat was made complete. His daughter was far away, figuratively lost. Soon, she’d be gone entirely. She’d fallen in love with Jaime Bravo, who was, at the time—1965—possibly the world’s most famous matador. Bravo was also a notorious playboy, and as the two argued in a Bolivian hotel room, Arabella turned a gun (where it came from was never fully determined) on herself.

  Arabella’s loss dwarfed Arbenz’s defeat in Guatemala. The drinking habit he’d fallen into during the last days of his regime turned stag gering during his time in Cuba. Was he still Jacobo Arbenz, the symbol of freedom? Or was he an object of disdain, representing weakness, as Fidel Castro implied when, with the exiled president watching on, he vowed that his country had learned a lesson: “Cuba,” he said, “is not Guatemala.”

  Arbenz knew what had happened to him, but he never understood why. He’d only wanted land the banana companies weren’t using. Why had they objected so violently? He’d been willing to negotiate. What he didn’t know was how badly the desperate fruit company believed it needed that land. He didn’t know that every square foot of fallow plantation was being held, just in case a cure was found for a rampaging disease. Panicked by an opponent that was out of its control, United Fruit wouldn’t budge and unleashed terrible vengeance on anyone who tried to force it to yield.

  BUT ARBENZ WASN’T AWARE OF THIS. In 1971, he returned to Mexico City. By then, almost thirty years after he’d been deposed, he had fallen into obscurity. If he was thinking of lost opportunities or of new strategies or of the civil war that was killing tens of thousands of his countrymen back home, there’s no record of it. There are those who believe that his last moments were filled with terror, at intruders who were looming over him as he lay in a hotel bathtub with a bottle of whiskey by his side. Maybe, at that moment, he was thinking of Arabella.

  Arbenz sank into the water. The man who dared to mount the boldest action ever attempted against the big banana company, before or since, wouldn’t open his eyes again.

  IN OCTOBER 1995, Jacobo Arbenz finally returned to Guatemala. One hundred thousand onlookers wept as the former president’s body was drawn down Guatemala City’s main avenue in a grandly decorated funeral carriage. The martyred ruler was interred in a white, pyramid-shaped mausoleum that is still visited by pilgrims today. Arbenz, to many Guatemalans, is their country’s Lincoln or Kennedy. Carlos Castillo Armas, the man who deposed him, is buried just a few feet away, under a largely ignored gray headstone.

  For years a debate raged in the United States over whether Arbenz was in fact a Communist, how much United Fruit was involved in the coup, and whether the entire operation had actually been stage-managed by the CIA. Starting in the late 1970s, Freedom of Information Act requests revealed thousands of pages of U.S. government papers, including budgets for the operation, and cables and correspondence between officials in Washington, intelligence operatives, United Fruit executives, and conspirators in Central America. One document lists over fifty Guatemalan officials targeted for “elimination.” A second contains instructions on how to accomplish that goal, in handbook form. The nineteen-page manual, reprinted in Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952–1954, by Nick Cullather, is titled Study of Assassination. “The simplest local tools are often the most efficient means of assassination,” counsels the booklet. “A hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice.” The authors do note that murder is not ethically justifiable, and that “persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it.” (I find it almost too grotesque to attempt to contemplate any good reason why a government founded on principles of freedom and democracy could so casually dismiss any debate between right and wrong, especially just nine years after the end of World War II.)

  Even as they adopted the Cavendish, and their need for territory diminished, the banana companies didn’t change all at once—or even change completely. Political adventures continued, though they’d center around more conventional bribery, graft, and union busting. But for the most part, the banana with stickers became an uncontroversial and beloved consumer product and one the larger world wanted. The fruit gained popularity in Europe and Asia. It was the unique wonder of the Cavendish—portability, convenience, strength, and most of all, consistency—that would make it so ubiquitous. These are, of course, the same things that make it so sick today.

  CHAPTER 28

  Banana Plus Banana

  BANANAS, wrote Australian biotechnology researcher James Dale, are a “plant breeder’s nightmare.” No seeds means no fertility. Multiple diseases mean that breeding for only a single kind of resistance can yield a new fruit that is promising yet functionally useless if it is still susceptible to another malady. Even if a new banana can fight off most of the organisms that attack it, it still has to meet the other requirements—shipping, ripening, and taste—that make it something more than a locals-only product. Thousands of agricultural experts—scientists and hobbyists, small-scale farmers and huge agribusinesses—spend years developing new species of roses, apples, melons, and citrus fruits. Bananas? Too difficult. Emile Frison, former director of the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP), estimated that the total number of scientists attempting to grow new bananas in the field was less than the number of fingers on a typical bunch of the fruit
they were working on: just five.

  To successfully breed bananas, you have to be stubborn; prideful; and, perhaps to the point of danger, obsessed—qualities that carry on, in an academic form, the tradition of the most celebrated and infamous bananeros. That was the case with the first scientists who attempted to make modified bananas in the 1920s, and it remains the case today. Most of all, you have to be patient. From the time the Cavendish was adopted until the first sign of the resurgent Panama disease that now threatens to destroy it, the person who best embodied those traits was Phil Rowe.

  Rowe didn’t invent the painstaking techniques that allowed banana scientists to breed the unbreedable, but he sharpened them, perfected them, and even succeeded with them, through a combination of genius and determination. Rowe arrived in Honduras in 1959, immediately after graduating from college. It was, according to retired Chiquita banana breeder Ivan Buddenhagen, the beginning of “the second flowering of banana research.” (The first was the research centered around the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad, during the 1920s and 1930s, which yielded the first hybrid fruit but failed to find an acceptable replacement for Gros Michel. It also established the fundamental methods banana scientists still use to create new versions of the fruit.)

  There were reasons for United Fruit to improve the banana, even after the Cavendish was adopted. Though it wasn’t seen as urgent, or even necessary, at the time, to find an alternative to the world’s new banana, United Fruit did hope to develop a variety that would be better than the one offered by Standard Fruit and other competitors.