ADVENTURES IN THE BANANA TRADE
Fair, Charles M.
Adventures in the Banana Trade Almost anything can set us old guys reminiscing—train whistles. World War II movies, the sound of Clifford Brown playing Dahoud. In my case, it's political news from...
...A friend of mine was an executive of Tropical Fruit and Steamship, which got itself on Zemurray's hit-list...
...he broke it in a six-week price war...
...No one who had done business in that doomed little country was surprised when our Government and press began their hysterical ravings about it in 1953...
...army uniforms', mostly too big for them, and carrying old Springfield rifles...
...If you asked a cochero where someone lived, he would make a sort of map for you in the air with his hands, explaining, dos cua-dras por alia, a la izquierda—so many blocks this way or that way...
...I was becoming disgusted with the banana business...
...Arevalo's successor, Jacobo Arbenz, was overthrown by a shadow army, an air force whose pilots threw grenades and sticks of dynamite out of the windows of sport planes, and a radio blitz that sounded like Orson Welles's Mars invasion broadcast...
...Costa Rica was a charmed, tiny country that had somehow escaped becoming a Mafia-style dictatorship like Nicaragua or a company store of the sort to which United Fruit had reduced much of Guatemala...
...United Fruit still owned the port...
...The cocheros were a sort of freemasonry, in touch with everything but too poor and insignificant to be worth punishing for "treason...
...It ran the one general store, charging the natives in U.S...
...Government surplus, importing bananas and mahogany into Tampa...
...They were wearing surplus U.S...
...To my amazement, one of the port charges we paid there was a social security tax for the dockworkers...
...Every time a Tropical ship was due to dock in Brownsville, a fleet of semis loaded with United Fruit bananas would arrive from New Orleans and dump its cargo at 4.5 cents a pound...
...Its capital, San Jose, was a lovely little city, with a central plaza where there were weekly band concerts and nightly promenades...
...It is not fashionable now to speak of evil, but the sense of it I had that day was prophetic, not only for myself but for the little republic so soon to be precipitated into unending civil war...
...The first thing you noticed in Managua were the signs of governmental neglect...
...I was sure, from talking to other Nicaraguans, that this policy of open frightfulness was deliberately pursued...
...The company, Zu-murray decided, was growing too rapidly...
...My run was first to Port Limon in Costa Rica, then to Bluefields, Nicaragua, then to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala...
...the cochero shouted after they had passed...
...Everyone knows it...
...In my case, it's political news from Central America...
...Government and the United Fruit Company—that they were not our people...
...On another occasion, 1 was riding in a coche when we had to stop to let a contingent of Guardia march past...
...It suited Somoza to let the citizenry know what went on in his jails...
...In Guatemala, the problem was—at least in the view of the U.S...
...The government of Juan Jose Arevalo was then only a year or two old, but already there was clear evidence of attempts to institute a Rooseveltian New Deal...
...Standing one day on the Tampa docks, beside a hard-faced old man I knew well, the broker and agent of a competitor, I was suddenly overcome by the sense of weariness I felt in him and by the squalor of the whole scene—the black stevedores handing along stems of fruit, the money-obsessed entrepreneurs like myself or the malignant old man next to me, whom I knew to have been implicated in the sadistic police-station murder of a union organizer who had come to Tampa several years before...
...What made you uneasy, especially if you were an "independent" like me—a banana trader living on the sufferance of United Fruit, docking only when United permitted, buying second-class fruit shipped at high rates on the railroad United controlled—was a feeling that none of this could last...
...Costa Rica was a genuine republic...
...I thanked him but declined...
...Such a feeling was entirely lacking in Nicaragua...
...There were pleasant boutiques, several displaying the works of native artists...
...The contrasts among these "banana republics" could hardly have been greater...
...It combined, in about equal measure, sophistication, cruelty, huge expense, and a schoolboyish ineptitude...
...dollars...
...Did you see...
...Arevalo and a few of his people were trying to change that, but they were up against Sam Zemurray and his "liberal" public relations representative, Edward Bernays, who was even then gearing up to present Guatemala to the American people as a "Communist beachhead...
...Todo elmundo...
...Knowing how Sam Zemurray worked, those of us who operated out of Puerto Barrios wondered how long Arevalo's new-born democracy could survive...
...Nor will we, perhaps, ever be done with the consequences...
...Did you see...
...Sam Zemurray, United's boss, was the terror of the industry, a legend for the ways he manipulated the countries where his company had holdings, the ways he intimidated competitors...
...Charles M. Fair (Charles M. Fair is the author of "From the Jaws of Victory," a book about military folly...
...Then, if you and the cochero agreed on a price, you would climb into his tattered buggy, he would whip up his Rocinante, all bones and flies and frayed harness, and away you'd go at two miles an hour...
...You had a feeling of being back in one of the gentler moments of the Nineteenth Century...
...Its citizens told you with some pride that they had more schoolteachers than soldiers...
...But no one seems to have known, partly because our press never told us, the details of the absurd and shabby campaign mounted by the Dulles brothers— John Foster in charge of the State Department, Allen in charge of the CIA—to destroy Guatemala's first attempt at democracy...
...No one had even bothered to give the streets names or numbers...
...Tropical had a fleet of converted Canadian destroyer escorts, very fast ships, running from Guayaquil, Ecuador, to Brownsville, Texas...
...They're your people...
...From my room in the town's ramshackle hotel, I could look down into the yards behind galvanized-iron-roofed shacks and see whole families taking their siesta at midday, lying on the bare ground, in clothes that were hardly better than rags, the small children usually naked...
...This wasn't just hearsay...
...the sabotage, the dirty infighting we "independents" used in competing with each other were far from the romantic dreams of Caribbean adventure I'd had when I went into it...
...Back in the late 1940s I was there—not for political reasons but as a small-time bananero who operated motor vessels, chartered or bought out of U.S...
...Everyone, I tried to tell him, except the folks back home...
...What I see in the news tells me we are not done with such enterprises...
...In 1948, during a reign of terror that followed an abortive uprising against Anastasio Somoza, a cochero offered to drive me to a spot near the presidential palacio where, he assured me, I would hear the screams of insurgents being tortured by the special police (then commanded by Somoza's son, Ta-chito...
...There were no traffic lights and only rarely a Guardia man at an intersection directing the chaotic traffic...
...I left the business soon afterward...
Vol. 46 • September 1982 • No. 9
