Bananas, p.15
Bananas, page 15
Sam Zemurray died, aged eighty-four, in November 1961, in retirement in Louisiana. Fifty years earlier he had launched the invasion of Honduras and boasted a stunning success. As a result of this latest exercise in military intervention by United Fruit, the company had been humiliated.
That did not prevent the company still making an impact. The Guatemalan coup of 1954 had led to the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, as a result of which Fidel Castro invited, or allowed, the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles on the island. This provoked the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Cold War incident thought to have been the nearest mankind has come to the end of the world. No one would have remotely imagined it had anything to do with bananas.
As for the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963, the conspiracy theories have been many and varied. United Fruit, with its famously ubiquitous tentacles, might find its part in them. Boston’s Wasps and its Catholic Kennedys had not always got along. Of those who had lost Cuban property, United Fruit had reason to feel as betrayed as any by Kennedy. Many of the stories of a plot to kill the president featured New Orleans, the company’s old southern capital. Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin-to-be, had an office in the city’s International Trade Mart building as did William Gaudet, ‘Bill’, the magazine editor associated with Edward Bernays’ early propaganda efforts for the company and friend of the CIA. Oswald and Gaudet appeared to have travelled to Mexico together. This was a short while before the assassination in Dallas, north across the Mexican–US border. Howard Hunt, asked in 2004 by Slate.com whether he had been in Dallas on the day, answered ‘no comment’. Nothing can be construed, of course, and all such ‘evidence’ is at best circumstantial. It may only show how easy it is to construct the skeleton of a conspiracy theory.
The Gros Michel, Big Mike, had finally succumbed to disease. At great cost United Fruit tore down its plantations and planted a new banana throughout Central America. This was the Cavendish, whose origins lay in the soon-to-be-defoliated forests of Vietnam, or possibly India. England’s Lord Cavendish had happened upon it in the days of the Raj, taken it back and nurtured it in the greenhouse of his stately home of Chatsworth in Derbyshire. The Cavendish wasn’t as fat and long as the Big Mike and its key virtue in commercial terms was that it was said to be disease resistant. It was not United Fruit that delivered to market this new variety and potential saviour of the business. Its rival Standard Fruit had done most of the development work, implying United Fruit was not the power of old.
Belatedly United Fruit had started producing in Ecuador. Thomas Cabot had suggested the idea in the 1940s and had been sacked for his pains by Sam Zemurray. Cabot had also pointed out that the labour unions were not very strong in Ecuador. When United Fruit set up shop in the country, therefore, there was no pressure from the local workforce to build hospitals and schools. United Fruit had always built its hospitals and schools to make sure it could attract people from the US. Now it wondered whether it should bother.
This new ‘Third World’ in which many people were living had its attractions. The term had only recently been coined. The first world was the West and the second the East as run by the Soviet Union. The third was the impoverished remainder. The first and second sides in the equation vied over whether, respectively, the free market or social welfare should be paramount. Each tried to resist the other but the first world had absorbed some of the influences of welfare and the people of the second wanted more free market. In the Third World most people thought themselves lucky to have a job.
United Fruit also had the revelatory idea of giving people their own land. These were substantial pieces, whole plantations. The company had been under pressure to allow producers more independence for years but had not until now been struck by the advantages. If it turned over plantations to the locals, this would stop their complaining. They would be less inclined to accuse the company of being ‘El Pulpo’. Also they would have to take responsibility for themselves, the diseases that afflicted the banana and the problems of running the business. It occurred to United Fruit that, for all these years and for all the criticism it had received about exploitation, it had been as much a welfare organisation as a proper business. It had taken care of people’s bugs in its hospitals and, at vast expense, those of the banana in the company’s purpose-built laboratories. Now it passed the affairs of the plantation over to the local people. It could as easily maintain control of them further along the business chain, in shipping and marketing. The new ‘independent’ producers still needed to get their bananas shipped and sold and wouldn’t be able to do so without United Fruit.
There were, however, more disturbing hints here of the company not being what it had been. Of old New England Puritan stock, it was a firm believer in the work ethic. It was a company that had always engaged in production and that proudly got its ‘hands dirty’. It was becoming more of a manipulator than a producer and losing its old self-esteem.
One independent producer it did not want around was Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, who in the early 1960s offered to buy United Fruit’s Panamanian plantations. He was someone who as a producer could take care of himself and wouldn’t need to be dependent on United Fruit. He may have wanted to buy the plantations to build a bridgehead in Panama in order to take over the Panama Canal. The US, the canal’s owner, might just have agreed. The waterway was becoming obsolete for modern shipping and Onassis, with his billions, had the resources to upgrade the canal. Everyone would have been happy, except his rivals in business who would have had to pay extortionate rates to get their ships through the canal while his went free. It was an idea worthy of Minor Keith, United Fruit’s old leader who had maintained such a grip on Central America’s railways. United Fruit was alive to this and turned Onassis down.
The company still thought it had the powers to stay in front of the pack. It took an important step in ‘branding’, which was still not a generic term except in the world of cattle ranching. Brands such as Rolls-Royce, Hoover and Coca-Cola emerged by commercial osmosis. United Fruit’s method was more akin to that of a cowhand with a hot iron aimed at the rump of a steer. It stuck small labels on its bananas with the image of Señorita Chiquita Banana. The company realised that for years she had gyrated for the benefit of all producers, as consumers who saw and liked her bought the first bananas they put their hands on. The new idea was to help them differentiate theirs from the rest. United Fruit had its labels put on every third banana, upwards of two billion stickers a year.
United Fruit was ‘playing God’ and laying claim to a thing of nature. That seemed appropriate enough, given that the company had created the modern banana. In reality, this form of branding was not entirely original. Californian fruit growers had shipped products with colourful labels since the 1880s. United Fruit had also adapted the idea from its long-term marriage with Fyffes, a case of something borrowed, something blue. Fyffes had introduced its blue label as long ago as 1929. Señorita Chiquita’s image on their bananas provided an exciting new impetus to the as-yet-underdeveloped art of branding. It was more like alchemy than art. A label applied by a lowly paid worker many hundreds of miles away somehow represented a mark of quality in the marketplace and was at first a great success. Sales jumped and gave the company renewed edge over the competition, though briefly. There was nothing to stop rivals introducing their own labels, which they soon did.
United Fruit missed a great opening in the 1960s. The decade had started promisingly enough as Harry Belafonte, the US singer who had been brought up in Jamaica, had his big hit with ‘The Banana Boat Song’. The Caribbean world that the calypso conjured was one with which United Fruit would have loved to have been associated, as tired yet contented workers sang after a full night humping stems into a ship’s hold.
A little further into the 1960s, Belafonte had reassessed his earlier lyrics and had become a leading activist in the civil rights movement. He was a link to the white middle class and pulled its stars on board, the already established Pete Seeger and the emerging Bob Dylan and Joan Baez among them. Civil rights marches and demonstrations turned violent when attacked in such places as Selma, Alabama, the town where Sam Zemurray had settled after leaving the anti-Semitism of Russia.
Protests quickly acquired an added edge. At the time of the Guatemalan crisis in 1954, President Eisenhower had warned the French to back off from involvement in Central American diplomacy that was being acted out at the UN. He had said that if they didn’t, then they could expect no US help in Vietnam. The same year, France had suffered the military defeat at Dien Bien Phu that led it to leave Vietnam. In place of the French, the CIA, emboldened by its success in Guatemala had stepped up clandestine involvement in Vietnam. By the mid-1960s it was the US that was embroiled.
Within the political turmoil and anti-war protests in the US at the time, a peculiar thing happened. United Fruit became fashionable. The most notorious of capitalist constructs acquired an edge of radical chic. The banana was the heart of it and crowds began to call out its name: ‘Ba-na-na!’ they chanted at a large rally (or Be-in), on Easter Sunday, 1967 in New York’s Central Park. In Bernays’ day the company would have relished the PR. Members of the assembled mass in New York carried large banana effigies. What did this symbolise – peace, innocence, disrespect? The crowd looked the ‘alternative’ type, slovenly dressed and with many of its number in T-shirts. Worse, many of the T-shirts bore United Fruit’s Señorita Chiquita logo. This was blatant theft of someone else’s image. Furthermore it was being pilfered by these demonstrators for quite the wrong purposes. These people weren’t United Fruit people but ‘agitators’. President Richard Nixon would soon have another word for them. Nixon was to return from the political wilderness to win the presidency in 1968 and he called this class of person ‘bums’.
United Fruit panicked when it discovered that dissidents were also using the banana for another inappropriate purpose: they were smoking it. ‘Banana heads’ were said to have discovered the fruit’s gift for producing an hallucinogenic high. Bananas, that had once been pushed as an alternative for meat for the working classes, now were being promoted as a substance to relax the discontented children of the middle-class. The fruit was touted as a cheap and legal alternative to LSD.
When the company’s distinguished forbears had driven prices down and created the mass market this was hardly what they would have imagined. Whether all this talk of highs was hokum or not, it swept across the market from coast to coast. The alternative press, which was becoming quite popular as well as mainstream, printed recipes for how to scrape, boil and bake your own. No recipe from United Fruit’s home economics department had ever been like that. The result tasted like compost, some said, but proved far more successful than United Fruit’s former line in bananas and bacon. A ‘banana-buying boom’ registered from San Francisco to Boston, from Haight-Ashbury to Harvard Square.
The banana slipped into popular culture. There was Donovan singing ‘Mellow Yellow’. Andy Warhol produced his album cover for The Velvet Underground and Nico portraying a banana with a zip that you could pull back. This was considered very good fun for the modern breed, though any oldsters that might have been tempted to take a closer look would have been in for a surprise. Pulling back the zip did not reveal an innocently pale piece of fruit but something pink. From United Fruit’s perspective the type of people who played this kind of prank were disgusting.
United Fruit didn’t get the joke and missed the moment. It countered all allegations that it was allied to the cause of ‘peace and love’ with dull detail. It cited reports from the government and the nation’s best universities in defence of its case that the banana had no dangerous neuro-chemical qualities. Failing to embrace the time, in the counter-culture the company saw only the wrong people when, in fact, they were fast turning into the right people: articulate, intelligent and with prospects. Theirs was becoming the established way of thinking and the view that demanded to be listened to. As these new thinkers moved towards joining those controlling the inner mechanism, United Fruit was being pushed to the margins.
The members of the United Fruit board met Eli Black on their territory. They repaired to the Algonquin Club on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue. It was among the brownstone town houses in the Back Bay adjacent to the Charles River. The building stood out with its flat grey masonry, managing to be a ‘cut above’ and solidly conservative. In the library, with its dark panelled ceilings and graveside sobriety, hung portraits of old club presidents.
The Wasps suspected they knew what Black would be like: he’d be hyperactive New York, probably loud and a ‘can-do’ man looking to muscle in on a world accustomed to the gentle passage of ships. He had called up that morning to announce himself as the mystery buyer of a large block of shares they had been worrying about for the past few days. He would fly up to Boston that afternoon.
Black was not fazed by his surroundings and, like his hosts, was understatedly polite. He understood that United Fruit was a proud company fiercely protective of its tradition. Would he uphold its values in the future? After dinner the board still worried that he wouldn’t.
United Fruit looked for other suitors among those it trusted. It thought it had found one in Textron, an established New England conglomerate. The parties reached the point of discussing possible names. United Fruit paid good money to one of the modern PR operations that were springing up everywhere and trading in matters of corporate image. Its representatives came up with several titles for the proposed new company, such as Panomega, Metromega and Corporad, none of which quite fitted the bill. The deal itself came to nothing. Other potential partners also made their excuses. The more some of them delved into the banana business the more they learned about its diseases and associated costs. It had all looked very straightforward at first. ‘What’s the big deal?’ said one would-be suitor. ‘So you have dinner once a year with the president of Honduras.’ Finally Black was the only one in the race.
Black had retired into the background at this point. Ever the salesman, he had made his pitch and it was time to shut up and let the other side agonise over how to respond. Amid the market speculation about his bid, the price of the shares he had bought went up and up. He would make money even if United Fruit turned him down, although as time passed it became clear it would not. Wall Street relished the thought of Black breathing new life into old United Fruit. He was a thrusting ‘asset manager’ who would take hold of a company that for years had mismanaged its assets. Black would sort things out. As one expert said, ‘whether he knows a banana plant from a potted palm is largely irrelevant’. Amid the excitement, Wall Street brushed aside rumours that there had been something remiss about Black’s mass purchase of the company’s shares.
The financial community backed the idea of the company entering the modern age, some reminiscing about the ‘nasty’ United Fruit of old. Slave traders and exploiters had founded it when, after the Civil War, looking for other outlets for their dubious talents they had happened upon bananas. The pioneers of the business had been no better than ‘conquistadors’ and among the ‘wildest and greediest men in history’, said New York’s Fortune magazine. Their list of sins ‘would hold even the prurient eye of a browser in a Times Square bookstore’. Lately, however, United Fruit had transformed itself into a distinguished giant, the largest employer in Central America and the one that built hospitals and schools for its people.
One worry that received attention was that, not so far back in United Fruit’s past, it had appeared in court. It had had that bitter anti-trust row over its affairs in Guatemala, as a result of which lands had been redistributed among its rivals and its monopoly over Minor Keith’s railroad taken away. The problem with this was that United Fruit’s name was ‘on file’. Any further difficulties, and that file would likely be re-opened. It was the way of law enforcement agencies to haul in the usual suspects and United Fruit would be an especially good one for them. It was old and tired and had plenty in its past for the regulators, the hyenas of the jungle, to return to and scavenge. The politicians, press and public would not care if the real offenders escaped, just as long as someone, or something, was brought to book. Then everyone would forget about it: case closed.
Under Eli Black’s leadership, United Fruit appeared to get off to a good start. As a sideline to its operations in Central America, the company had business interests in the US, in California for example, growing other agricultural products like lettuce. César Chávez, the union leader of the Mexicans who worked the fields, demanded new contracts for this underpaid and generally much abused labour force. Black said he would agree to the contracts, much to the surprise of his own management and to the chagrin of other big companies in the mucky world of agribusiness. More appreciative and no less amazed observers wondered whether they were witnessing a new enlightened United Fruit.
The company still had some of its more traditional touch. In 1969 the so-called ‘Football War’ broke out between Honduras and El Salvador. The two countries had long-standing frontier disputes that erupted after an especially fiery soccer game. El Salvador invaded United Fruit’s old ally Honduras, in the process taking the trouble to seize some radio installations the company used to supervise its Pacific shipping. The Salvadorean government made fleeting propaganda from its confronting the imperial majesty of United Fruit. In response, the company made a few calls on behalf of itself and Honduras and before long the Organisation of American States had arranged a truce. With Black, it seemed, some of the former glory might have returned.
Black saw himself as a scholar, an intellectual and a man of books. He took some pride in his library. It was, however, doubtful that he was much of a reader since chief executives normally had little time for such activities. In 1970, he may have missed, therefore, the publication, in translation, of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. What overtook United Fruit next, as it moved towards its last years and days, might have come from the pages of the book, with its pestilence, war and biblical winds.
