by Rich Cohen
When Arévalo formed his cabinet, he named Arbenz minister of defense. He did this to secure the loyalty of the military, where Arbenz was wildly popular. He then tapped Arbenz to succeed him as president, to pursue and complete the goals of the revolution. After winning the election, Arbenz formed a coalition government made of factions, including members of the small Communist Party of Guatemala. (As far as American officials were concerned, the presence of these Communists suggested Arbenz was probably a Communist himself.) He took the oath of office in the spring of 1951, with the departing president at his side. It was the first peaceful transition of power in the history of the country. In his farewell address, Arévalo ominously warned of the power of the banana company. “The revolution will have to be pushed forward,” he said, “or it will be lost.”
Arbenz was a different sort of president than his predecessor. Arévalo condemned United Fruit but never undermined the company or challenged Zemurray directly. He was cautious, deliberate. Arbenz advanced soldier-style, by quick, decisive strokes. He was a man aware of time, who wanted to push through his program before the weather changed. He did not fear Zemurray. In fact, it seemed he wanted to infuriate the bosses of United Fruit, make a display of his independence and defiance. He wanted to remind the banana moguls who the elected leader of the country really was. In his inaugural speech, Arbenz promised to make Guatemala “a dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy, [into] an economically independent country.” He said achieving this would mean ridding the nation of the latifundios, large private estates and farms, once and for all.
A new urgency was evident from the first days of his rule. It could be detected in the tone of informal diplomatic dialogue, as well as in the tenor of official communication. Whereas previous Guatemalan leaders seemed to accept U.F.’s view of its history—an enlightened company that had mastered nature (the conquest of the tropics)—the new government sought to undermine the founding myths of El Pulpo. (A company, like a nation, cannot survive without its mythology.) “All the achievements of the Company were made at the expense of the impoverishment of the country and by acquisitive practices,” said a government minister, Alfonso Bauer Paiz. “To protect its authority [United Fruit] had recourse to every method: political intervention, economic compulsion, contractual imposition, bribery, [and] tendentious propaganda, as suited its purposes of domination. The United Fruit Company is the principal enemy of progress of Guatemala, of its democracy, and of every effort at its economic liberation.”
On June 27, 1952, Arbenz signed Decree 900, which gave the government the right to expropriate uncultivated portions of large plantations. Farms under 223 acres were exempt, as were farms of 223 to 670 acres that were at least two-thirds cultivated. In a speech, Arbenz promised to “put an end to the latifundios and the semi-feudal practices, giving the land to thousands of peasants, raising their purchasing power and creating a great internal market favorable to the developments of domestic industry.”
Only one landowner held many great parcels of uncultivated property: United Fruit. It was the company’s hedge against the spread of Panama disease (U.F. cultivated only 15 percent of its property in Guatemala). Hundreds of thousands of acres were confiscated from United Fruit, broken into plots, and divided among thousands of peasant farmers. In return, the company was reportedly paid $627,572 in twenty-five-year Guatemalan bonds, which yielded 3 percent interest.
United Fruit officials complained to the Guatemalan government and to the U.S. State Department. Even if the seizure were legal, the price seemed grossly unfair. Auditors valued the land at $16 million. The Guatemalans said their appraisal had been determined by the company itself—from its own tax filings. (Zemurray, who had depreciated the company’s holdings after he took over in 1932, was now paying the price.) When a formal complaint was filed in Guatemala City—it said undervaluing for tax purposes was an accepted practice understood by previous governments and irrelevant to the land’s actual worth; it demanded full payment of the property’s real value—this came not from United Fruit but from the U.S. State Department, a detail Arbenz should have noticed.
Arbenz rejected the complaint and carried on as if no one could stop him. This assertion of authority proved as galvanizing as the seizure itself. By defying El Pulpo, Arbenz became a liberal hero across Latin America. His picture was posted everywhere. Finally, someone with the guts to stand up to the Banana Man. It marked the dawn of a new revolutionary era in the South. Spanish-speaking reformers of every variety—Communists, Socialists, Trotskyites—as well as adventure seekers and people simply curious to taste freedom, set off for Guatemala. By becoming a symbol and a refuge for the disenchanted, the country drew still more attention from the State Department. In the minds of diplomats, Guatemala was turning into a rogues gallery. Each day, more bad actors streamed into the country. Slept in hotels, camped on beaches, filled the coffeehouses with smoke and excited talk. It was the next fifty years in miniature. All the rabble-rousers who would long bedevil the United States seemed to be in Guatemala City, or on their way.
* * *
Here’s a picture of Che Guevara. He is wearing a beret and dirty fatigues, the uniform of the revolution. His hair is thick and dark, pushed back and tousled, as if blown by unseen winds, messy yet perfectly arranged in a style not unfamiliar to fans of Elvis in the middle years, when his name flashed behind him in lights. Che’s eyes, coffee brown, are rolled to the side of their orbs, perhaps spotting something in the periphery, the mobs that will follow him, the bullet that will kill him. It was his eyes, more than his beard, more than his Kalashnikov, that made him a trademark in the way of Chiquita Banana, United Fruit’s dancing mascot—the firebrand on the poster in the dorm room, the soldier at war with the stooges of the Banana Man. He’s leaning back, as if a battle has been won, as if there is time to enjoy. He smokes a cigar, the product of Cuban factories and fields, the symbol of the farmworker and the capitalist, as if to say, Look, I am smoking your cigar, my gringo friend.
Zemurray and Guevara were flip sides of a coin. First the Banana Man, then the revolutionary who fights the Banana Man. They would, in a sense, lead rival corporations: United Fruit and World Revolution, Inc. Two philosophies, two ways of life, the banana compound or the guerrilla camp. They were interdependent, two figures carved in a single block of stone, coiled around and facing each other.
Guevara grew up in Rosario, Argentina, on the Paraná River, in the northeast corner of the country. His given name was Ernesto. His family was Irish/Spanish, part of the elite. They were upper-middle-class liberals. Like Jacobo Arbenz, Guevara listed FDR among his heroes. He excelled at sports yet suffered debilitating asthma. In certain stories, he succumbs to an attack in the midst of battle, wheezing over his gun. Like many sickly children, he became acutely observant. He could see through appearances from the time he was small, recognizing not only the presidents but also the businessmen lurking in the shadows behind the presidents. He rooted against the big corporations the way other kids root against Superman villains. He said he first experienced true hatred while reading about the Braden Copper Company, a subsidiary of Kennecott, the American concern that dominated the South American mining industry. Spruille Braden, the big-faced Montanan who inherited the company, stood for everything Guevara despised. When Zemurray hired Braden—a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a State Department employee, he held positions at Standard Oil and W. Averell Harriman Securities—it confirmed Guevara’s sense of how the establishment is organized: the American government and the global companies might look like various concerns with varying interests but was in fact a single beast with a million mouths.
Guevara went to college, then medical school. In the summers, he toured South America, sometimes on foot, sometimes by motorcycle. He first came across a United Fruit compound in Costa Rica. He walked for miles through the fields and banana towns, which he described in his diary as “well-defined zones with guards who impede entry, and, of course, the
best zone is that of the gringos.” Guevara claimed that his philosophy crystallized by a campfire in the highlands, where he stopped after a day of travel. Twenty-five, a doctor with leftist sympathies, he found himself in conversation with an old man, a refugee of Stalin’s purges. He had been brutalized but still believed. He told Guevara to embrace his sense of injustice, as it was a finger pointing him in the right direction. “There’s a battle waging,” the old man said, “and you’re on one side or the other, even if you don’t know it.”
Guevara claimed it was at this moment—by the fire, beneath the pines—that he finally understood the inevitability of the universal struggle. But even if that’s true, it’s only part of the story. Guevara was an intellectual whose sense of reality came as much from literature as from experience. For him, a moment as clarifying must have come in 1950, when Pablo Neruda published the poem “United Fruit Company”:
When the trumpet blared everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehova distributed the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors and other entities:
United Fruit Inc.
reserved for itself the juiciest,
the central seaboard of my land,
America’s sweet waist.
It re-baptized its lands
the “Banana Republics,”
and upon the slumbering corpses,
upon the restless heroes
who conquered renown,
freedom and flags,
it established the comic opera:
it alienated self-destiny,
regaled Caesar’s crowns,
unsheathed envy, drew
the dictatorship of flies:
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soaked
in humble blood and jam,
drunk flies that drone
over the common graves,
circus flies, clever flies
versed in tyranny.
Among the bloodthirsty flies
The Fruit Co. disembarks,
ravaging coffee and fruits
for its ships that spirit away
our submerged lands’ treasures
like serving trays.
Meanwhile, in the seaports’
Sugary abysses,
Indians collapsed, buried
In the morning mist:
a body rolls down, a nameless
thing, a fallen number,
a bunch of lifeless fruit
dumped in the rubbish heap.
(Translated by Jack Schmitt)
In his elegy to William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” While that might or might not be true in the United States, it was not the case on the isthmus in the twentieth century. Zemurray, who defeated the jungle with the sweat of a hundred thousand workers, amassing a great fortune and empire in the process, was, in part, undone by forty-two lines of poetry. If I exaggerate, it’s only a little. In these years, a new Central American narrative was being written, a new foundational myth. United Fruit was going to be the devil in this narrative, the snake in the Garden. Zemurray understood this at some level and tried desperately to forge a new corporate identity. Hence all the money for universities and hospitals. But it was too late. By 1953, when Guevara started his bike and headed north to Guatemala, the basic outlines had been written. “I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit,” Guevara wrote in his diary, “convincing me once again of just how terrible the capitalistic octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old [and mourned] comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated. In Guatemala, I will perfect myself and achieve what I need to be an authentic revolutionary.”
* * *
You might say it was prejudice that left Zemurray unprepared for the furor. As I said, he did not believe the masses of the isthmus, poor, illiterate Indians, could grasp or rally to the cause of the intellectuals. It was only with the execution of Decree 900 that he became first concerned, then alarmed, then determined to fight.
In the old days, he might have simply hired an army of mercenaries, sailed down to the isthmus, and changed the government. But this was during the cold war, when even the smallest thing was about the biggest, and the U.S. government had its snout in every part of the world. A new day called for a new way to solve an old problem.
Zemurray, who tried to retire again a few years before, had returned to handle the Guatemala situation. No one else seemed up to it. He had long been hiring power brokers and lobbyists, men who could help him work the levers of government. Here, for the first time in the story of the banana trade, which began with parrot kings and guns for hire, you recognize the contours of the current system, where the millionaires who run Halliburton field white-collar armies who wreak more havoc than a whole division of Machine Gun Molonys.
Among the most effective of Zemurray’s government men was Tommy Corcoran, known in the White House and Congress and every tavern in D.C. as Tommy the Cork: you push him down here, he pops up over there. Corcoran had been one of the deftest operators in FDR’s White House, a Harvard graduate and a former clerk for Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. He worked as a lawyer for FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation and drafted much New Deal legislation, helping create, among other things, the Securities and Exchange Commission. He met Zemurray in 1936 while raising money for midterm congressional elections. Zemurray hired the Cork as soon as he left the government to work as a lobbyist. Sam referred to him as my man in court and kept him on a $100,000 yearly retainer, though the arrangement was secret. (His counsel to officials regarding bananas would be more trusted if people did not know it was paid for.) Corcoran briefed Zemurray on the thinking of top government officials. For example, under what conditions would President Truman be willing to go to war on the isthmus?
It was the Cork who insisted Zemurray hire Walter Bedell (“Beetle”) Smith. The head of the CIA under Truman, Smith became disenchanted when Eisenhower moved him to the State Department. “Right after he became Undersecretary of State, Beetle told me of his desire to assume the presidency of the United Fruit Company,” Corcoran wrote. “He told me he always liked to watch those pretty sailing ships on the Atlantic—the Great White Fleet. I took the message to the Fruit Company. I told them: ‘You have to have people who can tell you what’s going on. He’s had a great background with his CIA association.’ Their answer was: ‘He doesn’t know anything about the banana business.’ I told them: ‘For Chris-sakes, your problem is not bananas, you’ve got to handle your political problem.’”
To cover the right wing—the Guatemala crisis stretched across the Democratic administration of Truman and the Republican administration of Eisenhower—Zemurray hired John A. Clements, a newspaperman who later launched his own PR firm and did work for the Hearst Corporation for years. Clements, who was pals with Senator Joe McCarthy, connected Zemurray with the red-baiting fringe. Kept on a $96,000 yearly retainer, he lobbied congressmen and planted stories. When Clements died in December 1974, his correspondence was purchased by Hearst and burned.
The hiring went both ways, with officials leaving the government to join U.F., and U.F. executives taking positions in the government. Ed Whitman, U.F.’s in-house head of public relations, used to tell his employees that whenever people read “United Fruit” in the Communist propaganda, they mentally substituted “United States,” the implication being that these people were wrong and needed to be corrected. But looking back, it’s not clear who needed to be corrected. By 1954, the network of connections had grown so extensive it was hard to tell where the government ended and the company began. John Moors Cabot, the American assistant secretary of state in charge of Guatemala, was the brother of Thomas Cabot, who had been the president of United Fruit. John Foster Dulles, who represented United Fruit while he was a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell
—he negotiated that crucial U.F. deal with Guatemalan officials in the 1930s—was secretary of state under Eisenhower; his brother Allen, who did legal work for the company and sat on its board of directors, was the head of the CIA under Eisenhower; Henry Cabot Lodge, who was America’s ambassador to the UN, was a large owner of United Fruit stock; Ed Whitman, the United Fruit PR man, was married to Ann Whitman, Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary. You could not see these connections until you could—then you could not stop seeing them.
Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interest of the United States begin? It was impossible to tell. That was the point of all Sam’s hires: If I can perfectly align the interests of my company with the interests of top officials in the U.S. government—not the interests of the country, but the interests of the people in charge of the country—then the United States will secure my needs.
* * *
Zemurray’s most important hire was Edward Bernays, the man who invented modern public relations. Bernays approached the age of mass media like a scientist in search of general principles, which he recorded in articles and books: Crystallizing Public Opinion, Propaganda, The Engineering of Consent.
He had two basic insights from which everything else followed:
First: modern society, with its millions, is essentially ungovernable. The public must instead be controlled by manipulation. The men who do this manipulating, in government or not, are the true leaders, philosopher-kings. They need not manipulate all the people, only the few thousand who set the agenda. The drivers of history are not the people, in other words, nor the elite who influence the people, but the PR men who influence the elite who influence the people. “Those who manipulate [the] unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power,” wrote Bernays. “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”