Yes, we’ll have no bananas
BANANAS
How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World
By Peter Chapman
224 pp. Cannongate $24.00
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
United Fruit is dead. Chiquita lives.
The general public learned of United Fruit Company’s trouble in 1975 when its CEO, Eli Black, jumped from the 44th floor of a New York skyscraper. The ensuing investigation triggered the demise of one of the most controversial companies of the 20th century.
Bananas chronicles the birth, rise, and death of United Fruit over a century. Peter Chapman weaves an intriguing history including bananas, deceit, bullying, realpolitik, and murder. United Fruit Company, nicknamed El Pulpo (The Octopus) by its enemies, built a small empire with tentacles reaching into Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua, and beyond. The 1928 massacre of strikers in Colombia inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Calling United Fruit “the first of the modern multi-nationals,” Chapman describes the company as more powerful than many nation-states, and “a law unto itself,” specializing in coups d’etat to bring about the repressive regimes that helped it to prosper. In 1954, for example, the company persuaded the Central Intelligence Agency that Guatemala’s president, Jacobo Arbenz, was a Communist, and engineered his overthrow. Arbenz had raised serious issues of worker exploitation and land reform. United Fruit controlled vast acreage they preferred to leave unused rather than see it distributed to landless peasants.
Bananas goes beyond the issues of monopoly and greed that are so much a part of the public story. In the chapter, “Lament for a Dying Fruit,” Chapman explains the banana’s fragile ecology. Technically a grass and not a tree, with fruit nearly devoid of viable seeds, the banana has been propagated through cuttings for millennia. Although it flourishes “in areas hostile to man,” it only reaches its full potential on plantations, and is “effectively a clone.” United Fruit created the modern banana from one of over 300 varieties by taking it out of the jungle and cultivating it on large plantations. Thus they became a “pioneer of mass production” even before Ford Motor Company.
But don’t get too attached to the banana. This development and cultivation will prove to be the fruit’s downfall within the next decade, Chapman writes. Unable to evolve and develop resistance to diseases, it depends entirely on human intervention for its survival. The microbes, on the other hand, need no such intervention, continually morphing into new threats to the plant. The large plantations provide the environment where these new diseases can prosper and destroy the plants. “The banana has for a century been a first-rate example of ‘packaging,’” Chapman writes, “It exudes health in its natural wrapping while being diseased to its roots.” But packaging didn’t help Gros Michel, the larger variety that succumbed to disease a half century ago. The current variety is the Cavendish, which is equally threatened but without an obvious successor.
Chapman makes a number of interesting banana connections besides engineering the downfall of Arbenz in Guatemala, for example to the Watergate scandal and the Bay of Pigs. Howard Hunt was the common thread among them all in his clandestine attempts to subvert Communism wherever he saw it. Murderous gangs in El Salvador, Pinochet’s coup in Chile, Nixon’s career, the oil crisis of the 1970s, and the rise of multinational companies worldwide all seem to have been influenced—at least indirectly—by United Fruit.
At the beginning of this clear, well-written book are thumbnail descriptions of 31 participants in the drama as diverse as President Jimmy Carter and Sam “The Banana Man” Zemurray. The list gives the reader a sense of the vast influence one company wielded. Chapman is a Financial Times writer with a longstanding interest in the banana business, and he shows a firm grasp on his subject.
Chapman tells his story in the context of the larger world, how the banana wound up in the middle of the U.S. fight against Communism. So names such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and the Dulles brothers all play their roles.
El Pulpo’s monopoly is gone now—in fact, the company in its notorious form is gone—and Chiquita is the far tamer successor. One day soon we may have no more bananas, and we will be left with the bitter aftertaste of United Fruit.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books. His novel, When Pigs Fly, has received rave reviews.
Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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