by Katharine Mieszkowski
(Salon)On a trip to Honduras, journalist Dan Koeppel caught the banana bug. Researching an article
for Popular Science about attempts to breed a disease-resistant banana,
the American journalist wandered the grounds of the old Chiquita
compound, amid the fading colonial mansions and golf course, where he
stumbled upon the cheery yellow fruit’s unsavory past.
I went out for drinks at the old country club, and this old-timer
turns to me and goes, ‘In this room, governments were overthrown.’ It
was like something out of a movie, Koeppel says.
Flipping through an old Chiquita guest book, Koeppel saw the
scrawled names of United States senators, scientists, CIA agents and
Honduran presidents. Everybody was in there, he says. Browsing
through the research facility’s library, the journalist paged through a
chipper recipe book featuring the Chiquita banana girl, who was shown
topless, as she always was, giving instructions on how to prepare such
delicacies as banana coconut rolls. I found these strange Chiquita
cookbooks a hundred yards away from where massacres were planned, he
says.
For generations, the banana has been embraced and celebrated in pop
culture: Yes, we have no bananas. We have no bananas today! But it
took muscle and outright carnage to turn this fragile tropical treat
into the most popular fruit in the United States. The banana is the
yin and yang of American culture and blood, Koeppel says. The fruit
became his obsession and the subject of his book, Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.
Surprisingly, Koeppel isn’t the only journalist of late to light out
to the tropics and come back with tales of the banana’s bloody role in
history. For Peter Chapman, a Financial Times reporter, who spent years
covering Latin America, the great banana company, United Fruit, which
later became Chiquita, prefigured the rise of the modern multinational
corporation. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that something we would
imagine as innocuous as bananas has produced as many exercises in
regime change as has ever been enacted in the name of oil, says
Chapman, whose book is called Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World.
The banana we eat today may be natural in the sense that it grows on
a plant, but it’s as much a mass-market product as a Big Mac, designed
to be cheap, sweet and reliable. Yet the human affinity for bananas
goes back 7,000 years, long before pesticides, refrigerated shipping,
transportation networks and branding, like the Dole sticker on the peel
of the supermarket variety.
It shocked me to see that the history of this fruit goes hand in
hand with the history of humanity, says Koeppel. Wherever people
went, the banana accompanied them. Some biblical scholars argue that
the fruit Eve tasted in the Garden of Eden was not an apple, but the
much more suggestively shaped banana.
The mass-produced banana first came to the United States in the 19th
century. As the next century rolled on, buccaneering banana men
pioneered such innovative business practices as propping up puppet
heads of states throughout Latin America, keeping them in power through
corporate largesse, and exploiting local workers, when not actually
encouraging local governments to enslave or kill them. By building
railroads, in exchange for land for plantations, United Fruit tightly
entwined itself with the economies of many countries, and came to own
huge swaths of Central America. Its reach was so extensive that it
became known as the Octopus.
When local leaders threatened taxes or complained about the
company’s abysmal labor practices, such as paying workers exclusively
in company scrip to be spent only at the company store, United Fruit
threatened to leave the country, taking its business next door. Mere
bribes to local officials were strictly junior varsity in this jungle.
In some countries, United Fruit blatantly paid no taxes at all for
decades. In others, when troubled by local officials, it simply
installed a more sympathetic government. In Honduras in 1911, the
banana men not only staged an invasion to depose the current regime and
put in a new one, they had the audacity to demand the new government
reimburse the costs incurred in the invasion!
United Fruit was not to be crossed. In Colombia in 1928, 32,000
banana workers went on strike, demanding such niceties as toilet
facilities at plantations. In a massacre later immortalized in
literature by Gabriel Garc韆 M醨quez in One Hundred Years of
Solitude, the military killed 1,000 unarmed striking workers and their
families in the town square in Cienaga after Sunday church services.
The banana men, however, saw themselves not as ruthless corporate
overlords but as a force for all that’s good in civilization. In 1912,
in Guatemala, while clearing the jungle for banana plantations, the
company uncovered the Mayan ruins of Quirigu? and paid for
archaeologists to restore it, welcoming comparisons between the great
lost civilization of the Mayans and the new one the company was
building in the jungle.
They thought they were bringing back the era of the Mayans,
returning Central America from the savages back to its glory days of
empire, says Koeppel. The company used that notion to buff its image
at home and abroad. As Chapman explains, the companies knew how to use
such methods to ingratiate themselves into the minds of ordinary
people, and come across appearing on the side of light and justice.
Today, when the business buzzword corporate social responsibility
is so commonplace that it has its own acronym, CSR, it’s sobering to
remember that the banana czars themselves invented the term. Now, we
are expected to entrust our futures to the free market and
better-behaved companies as a result of this new doctrine of ‘corporate
social responsibility,’ says Chapman. But it does make you wonder,
given the very inventor of the concept represented itself as a paragon
of virtue, which didn’t stop it from committing all manner of abuses.
It may seem hard to believe that the banana business could be as
nefarious as the oil business. But to our banana chroniclers, it may
have been worse. The banana men managed to be at once ferociously
exploitative, while cultivating a beloved image with their customers,
pioneering public relations and marketing practices still in use today.
Nobody has ever loved the oil companies, says Koeppel. Everyone
has needed them, and they have a bloody history, but no one has ever
said, ‘Gee whiz! Those guys at Shell have such a cute little jingle.’
But when it comes to bananas, the 1944 Chiquita song is arguably the
best-known jingle ever: I’m Chiquita banana and I’ve come to say?quot;
But the banana men’s mastery of spin didn’t stop at catchy jingles.
In the 1950s, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala tried to force
United Fruit to sell its fallow land back to the government. The
president planned to redistribute it to landless peasants. To incensed
banana leaders, this was an act of sovereign defiance.
One United Fruit P.R. man wrote a report, which he sent to 800
influential conservative Americans, sounding the alarm about communism
gaining a foothold in Latin America via Guatemala. The company employed
no lesser force than the father of public relations himself, Edward Bernays.
Promptly, Bernays flew journalists to Guatemala on luxury
fact-finding missions, which resulted in dozens of articles published
in Time, Newsweek, the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times,
portraying the Guatemalan leader as a dangerous threat.
Bernays called the stories masterpieces of objective reporting,
and went so far as to suggest that somewhere behind the Iron Curtain,
Russia was training revolutionaries to take over Latin America. In case
anyone missed the point, United Fruit’s P.R. team put out a movie
titled, Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas. It wasn’t long before the
Guatemalan president, who had dared to defy United Fruit, was ousted
with the help of the CIA. He ended up stripped down to his underwear,
paraded before the press in the airport, and sent into exile, never to
return again.
Today’s banana companies don’t have anywhere near the power in
Central America that they once did. That’s in part because they don’t
have to. They’ve discovered the joy of outsourcing. After all, why deal
with those pesky labor problems when you can have local producers
assume all the inherent risks of growing an agricultural commodity?
What the banana men figured out, Chapman explains, is that we don’t
have to own the land, we can give it to the local guy who wants to run
his own plantation. We still have our railway, shipping line and
sophisticated access to marketing. We don’t have to be involved at the
ground level with all the expense and aggravation, and all the
headaches that go with it. Chiquita is now mostly a distribution and
marketing concern.
But the legacy of their bad old days lives on. You can’t blame
United Fruit for everything that’s wrong in Central American politics,
says Chapman. Yet in many cases, by propping up weak governments, it
helped create a power vacuum that’s been filled by right-wing death
squads and left-wing guerrillas. In Guatemala’s decades-long civil war,
more than 200,000 people have died. When some moderate leaders have
advocated for a civilian government, they’ve been summarily executed.
I was with one such leader myself, says Chapman.
Even today, the taint of international scandal dogs the bananas in our supermarkets. In 2002, Human Rights Watch documented
banana workers in Ecuador suffering widespread human rights abuses,
including use of child laborers as young as 8 years old, and workers
being fired for trying to organize. In 2007, Chiquita was fined $25
million by the U.S. Department of Justice for making payments to
terrorist organizations in Colombia.
Both books also peel back the environmental fallout of bananas. The
authors suggest that the commonplace banana we eat today, a cultivar
called the Cavendish, will likely become the next victim of the same
Panama disease that drove its predecessor, the once ubiquitous Gros
Michel cultivar, to commercial extinction.
The race is on to build a better banana that can stand up to Panama
disease and shipping, ripen at the right rate once picked for the
grocery store customer, and still be cheaper than that locally grown
apple or pear. In a few decades, we could be eating cornflakes topped
with an entirely different variety of banana, a notion that’s certainly
more comforting than the idea that we might have to give up this cheap,
potassium-rich comfort food altogether.
In the meantime, the mass production of bananas for the world
marketplace threatens the local varieties that millions of people
around the globe depend on to keep starvation at bay. It’s a lot like
AIDS, which is believed to have spread through Africa along newly built
highways, says Koeppel. As more and more commercial plantations are
being built in Africa, the chances of cross-contamination increase. We
are creating the possible disease vector.
Scientists are trying to create a more disease-resistant banana
through cultivation and genetic engineering. But it’s not easy. The
banana, which is a giant berry plucked from the world’s largest herb,
is seedless, sexless and sterile. Because banana offspring are
genetically identical to their parents, it makes them all the more
vulnerable to disease.
Ultimately, banana fan Koeppel says he hopes learning more about
bananas won’t cause readers to turn away from them. What I don’t want
people to think is, ‘Oh my gosh, I should never eat a banana.’ I just
want people to think about this universal fruit in a real way.
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