THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 2, 2008
Big Fruit
By DANIEL KURTZ-PHELAN
BANANAS
How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World.
By Peter Chapman.
224 pp. Canongate. $24.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Kurtz-Phelan-t.htmlWhen the Banana Company arrives in Macondo, the jungle town in Gabriel
García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” it brings with it first
modernity and then doom. “Endowed with means that had been reserved for
Divine Providence in former times,” García Márquez writes, the company
“changed the pattern of the rains, accelerated the cycle of harvests and
moved the river from where it had always been.” It imported “dictatorial
foreigners” and “hired assassins with machetes” to run the town; it
unleashed a “wave of bullets” on striking workers in the plaza. When the
Banana Company leaves, Macondo is “in ruins.”
If Macondo is meant to represent Latin America, it is fitting that “the
Banana Company” plays so central a role in its development and decline. For
much of the 20th century, the American banana company United Fruit dominated
portions of almost a dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere. It was,
Peter Chapman writes in “Bananas,” his breezy but insightful history of the
company, “more powerful than many nation states ... a law unto itself and
accustomed to regarding the republics as its private fiefdom.” United Fruit
essentially invented not only “the concept and reality of the banana
republic,” but also, as Chapman shows, the concept and reality of the modern
banana. “If it weren’t for United Fruit,” he observes, “the banana would
never have emerged from the dark, then arrived in such quantities as to
bring prices that made it available to all.”
Today, “the banana is the world’s fourth major food, after rice, wheat and
milk.” But when a Brooklyn-born twentysomething named Minor Keith planted a
few banana cuttings next to a railroad track in Costa Rica in the early
1870s, it was virtually unknown outside its native environs. Keith and his
partners soon realized how great the potential profits were — especially if,
along with growing bananas, they could control railroads, shipping and
Central American governments (to that end, Keith married the beautiful
daughter of a Costa Rican president). Only then did they set out to turn the
banana into a product for the masses. Until its demise a hundred years
later, United Fruit controlled as much as 90 percent of the market.
Throughout all of this, United Fruit defined the modern multinational
corporation at its most effective — and, as it turned out, its most
pernicious. At home, it cultivated clubby ties with those in power and
helped pioneer the modern arts of public relations and marketing. (After a
midcentury makeover by the “father of public relations,” Edward Bernays, the
company started pushing a cartoon character named Señorita Chiquita Banana.)
Abroad, it coddled dictators while using a mix of paternalism and violence
to control its workers. “As for repressive regimes, they were United Fruit’s
best friends, with coups d’état among its specialties,” Chapman writes.
“United Fruit had possibly launched more exercises in ‘regime change’ on the
banana’s behalf than had even been carried out in the name of oil.”
In its final pages, Chapman’s witty, energetic narrative veers off into
polemic, straining to flaunt some direct contemporary relevance. Today’s
supporters of multinational corporations, Chapman declares, “would have us
all as banana republics.” But his heart is more in the storytelling than in
the lecturing, and he never does much with these sweeping proclamations.
Still, that is not to say there are no echoes of United Fruit today. Chapman
could have noted, for example, that the company’s successor in the banana
business, Chiquita Brands International, has admitted to paying nearly $2
million to right-wing death squads in Colombia. And the blow-back from
United Fruit’s way of doing business still haunts Latin America. Just look
at Guatemala — once United Fruit’s most treasured possession, now one of the
Western Hemisphere’s most violent countries.
“Guatemala was chosen as the site for the company’s earliest development
activities,” a former United Fruit executive once explained, “because at the
time we entered Central America, Guatemala’s government was the region’s
weakest, most corrupt and most pliable.” When a left-wing democratic
president named Jacobo Arbenz tried to roll back the company’s dominance in
the 1950s (by, among other things, redistributing its fallow land), United
Fruit executives saw it as an affront — and set out to help pressure the
United States government to engineer a coup. Fortunately for them, virtually
every major American official involved in the plotting had a family or
business connection to the company itself.
A young Argentine traveler named Che Guevara happened to be in Guatemala
when Arbenz was overthrown in 1954. After that, Che told his mother, “I left
the path of reason.” And so, too, did Latin America. That day marked a
turning point, the end of a hopeful age of reform and the beginning of a
bloody age of revolution and reaction. Over the next four decades, hundreds
of thousands of people — 200,000 in Guatemala alone — were killed in
guerrilla attacks, government crackdowns and civil wars across Latin
America.
A resident of García Márquez’s Macondo provides an epitaph: “Look at the
mess we’ve got ourselves into just because we invited a gringo to eat some
bananas.”
Daniel Kurtz-Phelan is a senior editor at Foreign Affairs.
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