Banana

by Dan Koeppel

  1871–80: Minor C. Keith, a twenty-three-year-old Brooklyn entrepreneur, secures a contract to build a national railroad in Costa Rica. The building of the railroad costs over five thousand lives, including those of Keith’s two brothers. As a way to create business for the trains, Keith plants bananas in cleared rain forest along the trackside. This begins a long cycle of lopsided land deals and forest clearing operations benefiting banana entrepreneurs.

  1876: The horticultural hall of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition features bananas—positioned, for the first time, as a cheap and healthy substitute for apples. It is the beginning of America’s love affair with the fruit (the other major sensation at the exhibition: Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone).

  1885: As more and more American families find out what bananas are—and want them—Lorenzo Dow Baker starts the first banana importing company. Boston Fruit would later change its name to United Fruit and finally to Chiquita.

  1894: The U.S. military intervenes in Nicaragua to quell possible land and labor reforms. The action is the first in a long series of North American exploits in Central America that happen mostly at the behest of the banana companies. Over thirty more instances of U.S. involvement, many of which still have bloody repercussions today, are recorded over the next century.

  1899:Scientific American offers scholarly advice on the best techniques for peeling a banana.

  1900: Boston Fruit changes its name to United Fruit; it won’t officially become Chiquita until the 1970s. A rival company, Standard Fruit, is founded in New Orleans, the central arrival point for all U.S. banana imports. That company will also change its name, to Dole, in the 1970s.

  1900: U.S. banana entrepreneurs begin to settle outposts throughout Central America, creating private, elite enclaves—some of them entirely raucous, with brothels and honky-tonks—that are far removed from the dismal conditions the workers they employ labor and live under. If there are protests, the U.S. military is quick to intervene.

  1900: Panama disease, which would later decimate world banana crops, is identified in Java, though it has yet to be given a name. A variant of the disease is today attacking the banana variety that accounts for 99 percent of all U.S., Canadian, and European imports.

  1901: Guatemala hires United Fruit to run its national post office; the company will soon assume governmental functions in most of its Central American client nations.

  1902–35: United Fruit paints its shipping vessels white, dubbing them the Great White Fleet. It outfits the ships with fancy state-rooms and tourist amenities as a way of making sure that boats laden with bananas in one direction will carry some kind of cargo—in this case, wealthy Americans—in the other (the tourists return home by train). The enterprise is a huge success, and—though it is interrupted by World War I and finally terminated during the second global conflict—the company can claim credit as an innovator of the all-inclusive Caribbean cruise.

  1903: Panama disease appears for the first time in Central America. How the blight got from the South Pacific to Panama remains a mystery, though it may be the first case of global commerce carrying a pathogen along with its economic benefits.

  1904: United Fruit implements a radio technology that allows instantaneous communications between approaching cargo vessels and mainland plantations. The “tropical radio” system, in turn, allows precision harvesting of bananas. In the past, the picking began as soon as the boat appeared on the horizon, resulting in inefficient, all-night frenzies to harvest and load fruit before it spoiled. Now, with advance notice of a ship’s arrival, picking can be perfectly timed—essential for the rapid delivery of a product with a shelf life of ten days or less.

  1904: United Fruit is granted a ninety-nine-year, unlimited license to build railroads in Guatemala and cultivate all lands in a wide swath alongside the newly laid tracks.

  1904: The banana split is invented in Pennsylvania.

  1904: The banana split is invented in Columbus, Ohio.

  1905: Honduras begins a nearly century-long reign as the world’s largest banana exporter.

  1906: The banana split is invented in Iowa.

  1907: The banana split is invented in Wilmington, Ohio.

  1910: An early banana laboratory is opened in Costa Rica. Scientists show some interest in breeding disease-resistant fruit, but then, as now, a key conflict emerges: Should efforts be focused on building better bananas, or finding more and more potent substances—pesticides, fungicides, and other chemicals—to stop pests before they damage crops? Nearly all the time, the banana companies choose the environmentally devastating latter alternative.

  1910: Samuel Zemurray, future president of United Fruit, is challenged by the U.S.-backed government of Honduras. Zemurray organizes a private coup, led by a pair of gangsters named Guy “Machine Gun” Molony and Lee Christmas. It takes just four weeks for the Honduran regime to fall; a friendlier president is installed, and his first significant act is to grant a huge banana concession to Zemurray.

  1911: A rebellion against the new Honduran government is quelled by U.S. troops, who are sent, ostensibly, to guard American banana workers.

  1913: United Fruit strikes a land-for-railroads deal in Honduras.

  1915: United Fruit’s Great White Fleet now has ninety-five ships, each of which can carry up to a half million bananas.

  1916: The Great White Fleet is temporarily dry-docked after legendary German naval commander Count Felix von Luckner targets—and sinks—several of the vessels.

  1920: Guatemalan banana workers attempt to unionize. U.S. marines arrive to “police” the nation.

  1920: The Fruit Dispatch Company is formed to distribute bananas in the United States. Over the years, the company—a subsidiary of Chiquita and its predecessor entities—introduces numerous technological innovations that transform, and actually help build, America’s consumer culture. The driving force is that the banana importers are succeeding at the impossible: bringing highly perishable, tropical fruit to northern consumers year-round. Over the years, Fruit Dispatch develops refrigerated shipping, central warehouses for supermarkets, and product-tracking systems that will ultimately morph into today’s sophisticated retail technologies, such as bar coding and freshness dating.

  1922: Panama disease, in just under two decades, has spread to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the Canary Islands—basically following the same route that the earliest cultivated bananas did as they migrated west. Meanwhile, United Fruit’s growing home economics department invents dried banana chips.

  1923: Songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn score a hit with their song, “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” The lyric supposedly relates to the periodic shortages in banana supply that are beginning to crop up, the result of advancing difficulties in combating soil-based pathogens that destroy tropical crops. For the rest of the century, and through today, battling these pathogens becomes a more and more costly, intense, and difficult war for banana growers.

  1924: United Fruit prints recipes for corn flakes with banana slices and encourages cereal companies to include discount vouchers inside their boxes; it is the first supermarket coupon to be packaged with another product.

  1925: Panamanian banana workers go on strike; the rest of the nation soon follows. Bananas rot in the fields, the Panama Canal closes, and U.S. troops intervene.

  1928: The entire Central American banana industry experiences labor unrest. Strikes, worker riots, and demands for better wages and conditions will grow through the next decade—as will the measures taken by banana companies to squelch them.

  1928: The first human-bred banana is grown in Trinidad. This is one of the earliest attempts to find a replacement for the Gros Michel, the classic export banana that is rapidly succumbing to Panama disease.

  1929: A banana-workers strike in Colombia is brutally suppressed. Vigilante squads, sponsored by United Fruit and trained by the U.S. military, act against the strikers and terrorize the nation. The action leads directly to the viol
ent guerilla battles between the right-wing descendants of those squads and the left-wing gangs—both supported by drug money—that plague Colombia today.

  1930: Banana companies build huge ripening rooms in the United States. Ethylene gas, a natural substance given off by ripening fruits, is used to control the level of ripeness. The rooms work by regulating temperature—cooler means the fruit matures slowly—while more ethylene hastens the process. The result is bananas that arrive at the market on their final green day, and which will last exactly seven days before turning brown. That such standardization could be introduced in a fruit is a symbol of how adept the banana companies are at manipulating and maximizing their profit potential.

  1932: United Fruit fires striking Honduran banana workers. The strike’s organizer is assassinated.

  1935: Sigatoka disease is identified in Central America. This is the major blight facing today’s global banana crops, but it is controllable (albeit with increasing and more expensive quantities of pesticides as the fungus develops resistance). The first attempt to control Sigatoka is with Bordeaux mixture, a toxic, thick, oily substance that causes illness in thousands of banana workers. At the same time, Panama disease devastates some Honduran fields so badly that an entire port-side town, Puerto Castillo, is abandoned. The strategy for dealing with the disease was to simply move operations to healthier areas; it was through this constant migration that banana companies cut down huge tracts of Central and South American tropical forest.

  1935: Banana companies make some effort to improve labor conditions, but their fundamental control of Central American nations remains intact. Use of the term banana republic becomes common after it appears in an article in Esquire magazine. Another name, little known in the U.S. but seen as the complementary and explanatory counterpoint to the emerging English coinage, is El Pulpo. The Spanish word for “octopus” specifically describes United Fruit.

  1939: In the United States, United Fruit begins to offer free textbooks to grade schools. The books are filled, of course, with information on bananas.

  1941: Much of the Great White Fleet is commandeered into service by the U.S. Navy for World War II. Unable to get significant quantities of product to market, the banana industry suffers huge losses.

  1944: As the war wanes, a new banana industry emerges: one that relies as much on marketing as it does on blunt tactics. The Chiquita brand name is introduced as part of this effort. The brand’s famous jingle is inspired by the banana dances done by Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda, especially her over-the-top, suggestive number in Busby Berkeley’s musical “The Gang’s All Here.” The Chiquita jingle advises “never” to refrigerate a banana. Doing so, it warns, will make the bananas brown (true enough, but that it will also extend the fruit’s life by a week isn’t mentioned). The original Miss Chiquita Banana is a cartoon character drawn by Dik Brown, who later created Hagar the Horrible.

  1946: United Fruit owns nearly a million acres of land in Cuba, Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia.

  1947: Guatemala adopts a “worker protection code.” United Fruit describes it as “communistic.” The New York Times Magazine prints a recipe for bananas with ham, cheese, and mustard.

  1950: Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, a cycle of 350 poems, includes an entire chapter of poetry about the suffering created by the actions of United Fruit. At the same time, Standard Fruit develops a cardboard box with handles and holes, similar to the one now used to ship every banana (and many other fruit varieties). The ability to box bananas will become a major advantage when the Gros Michel, finally wiped out by disease, is replaced by the more fragile Cavendish. This event is less than a decade away, but, except for a few new technologies and some threadbare research, the problem is mostly denied by banana executives.

  1951: Jacobo Arbenz becomes the first democratically elected leader of a Central American country. His ascendance to the presidency of Guatemala is not pleasing to the banana companies.

  1952: Arbenz nationalizes a quarter million acres of unused United Fruit land, leaving only productive fields under company possession. The act enrages the United Fruit board, which begins to search for a way to “solve” the Arbenz problem.

  1953: The first commercial Cavendish varieties are grown by Standard Fruit.

  1953/1954: Samuel Zemurray, the ostensibly retired United Fruit chairman who engineered the first banana company coup in Central America, finances the publication of a book called “Report on Guatemala.” The book, which seeks to prove that Arbenz is “under Moscow’s control,” is distributed to every member of the U.S. Congress. Armed with the Zemurray-commissioned report, Congress urges President Truman to act on the “crisis” that appears to be threatening U.S. interests in Guatemala (and, in an early version of the Vietnam-era domino theory, throughout the rest of the region). Truman authorizes CIA action, including the compilation of a list of fifty-four Guatemalans—among them, Arbenz and other members of his government—who are to be “eliminated.” A coup is mounted, and the Arbenz government falls; Arbenz goes into exile. One of the witnesses to the coup is a young physician named Ernesto Guevara, who’ll soon become one of the region’s most prominent radicals, taking on the nickname “Che.” Over the next thirty years, the dictatorship that took over from Arbenz will seek to stamp out any form of leftist or agricultural activism. Over 200,000 Guatemalans, including many ethnic Mayas, are killed.

  1955: Fifteen million pieces of banana industry–produced literature are distributed to U.S. schoolchildren.

  1957:Green Prison, a novel by Ramon Amaya Amador, is published in Honduras. It galvanizes workers with its accurate description of conditions on the banana plantations.

  1958: The end of the Gros Michel era nears. Chiquita scientists, after decades of denial, begin experimenting with replacements.

  1959: Chiquita begins sending scientists to Asia on collecting expeditions, hoping to find a suitable new banana for U.S. consumers.

  1960: Chiquita opens a research program in banana genetics and breeding at La Lima, Honduras. The program is headed by Phil Rowe, who will go on to become the most successful breeder of new banana species in history.

  1961: Cuban exiles, sponsored by the CIA, fail in an attempt to depose Fidel Castro. The Bay of Pigs operation is partially funded by United Fruit, which lends its shipping fleet to the invasion force. The banana industry’s alleged motivation? Revenge on Castro for nationalizing Cuban plantations following the 1959 revolution.

  1961: Wide-scale adoption of the Cavendish banana begins, requiring huge changes in methods for handling the fruit. The variety, though tasty, is nowhere near as hardy as the Gros Michel, which could simply be cut down by the bunch and tossed into ships’ cargo holds. The Cavendish needs to be handled delicately, so methods of boxing and bagging are adopted. This, in turn, leads to further developments, including the opportunity to brand bananas, via the sticker found on every other fruit in each supermarket bunch, and a technological system for tracking bananas from field to market (the use of numeric codes to identify price, origin, harvest, and destination information is the direct ancestor of today’s bar codes).

  1964: Standard Fruit changes its name to Dole.

  1965: Ecuador becomes the largest exporter of bananas in the world, supplanting Honduras. (The lead will change hands over the ensuing decades.)

  1967: Chiquita distributes ninety thousand recipe cards detailing an unheard-of creation: the peanut butter and banana sandwich.

  1968: World banana consumption tops 4 billion pounds.

  1969: A banana museum opens in Altadena, California.

  1970: Replacement of the Gros Michel by the Cavendish is complete. The project is so successful, in fact, that it leads to an over-supply of bananas. Prices drop precipitously.

  1972: Black Sigatoka, a disease that rots banana leaves, is first observed. Though it is controllable, treatment efforts require dangerous and costly chemical sprayings or constant moving of banana crops
to virgin soil, resulting in the further destruction of rain forest.

  1974: The Securities and Exchange Commission launches an investigation against Chiquita after it learns that the company gave a $1.25 million bribe to the president of Honduras. Chiquita chairman Eli Black leaps out the forty-third story window of New York’s Pan Am Building, right above Grand Central Station. The Honduran government is overthrown and Costa Rica threatens to evict United Fruit from its territory.