Bananas, p.2
Bananas, page 2
There were other older companies than United Fruit in the modern era too, but originally they had been stay-at-home types. The US’s nineteenth-century ‘robber barons’ in oil, railways, steel and banking made their profits without straying far beyond national borders. They had paid a penalty for this as eventually laws were made to curb their practices and, to some extent, they were forced to ‘behave’. By contrast, for a long time United Fruit had avoided this fate because it was out on a wider frontier. It had set up its own enclave in Central America, a network of far-flung plantations and company towns that acted as an experimental laboratory for capitalism, unhindered, unwatched and forging ahead into the great unknown.
United Fruit had started with a few bananas grown at the side of a railway line and become a global power. It took many forms and went by many names: La Frutera, the fruit company; El Yunay, as in Yunay-ted Fruit; or simply La Compañía. Famously it was El Pulpo, the octopus, its tentacles everywhere. It was greedy and controlled millions of acres of land, only a relatively small part of which it used. In countries of many landless small farmers, it kept the rest to keep out competitors and for a ‘rainy day’. In and around its plantations it had fifteen hundred miles of railways, a good number of which its host countries built and paid for.
United Fruit’s Great White Fleet of refrigerated ships, ‘reefers’, comprised the world’s largest private navy. Painted against the heat, its ships ran cruises to places of which people could scarcely dream: Havana with its casinos, brothels and other palaces of entertainment; the cays of Belize; the Panama Canal. Its in-house slogan, however, upheld its status as a merchant line: ‘every banana a guest, every passenger a pest’.
Its plantation hospitals, which were mainly built to accommodate its supervisors and managers brought down from the US, formed the largest private health system in the world. In Guatemala the company saved the Mayan ruins of Quiriguá from the jungle. It installed the tramways and electric street lighting of the Costa Rican capital, San José. United Fruit was power.
For my thesis I read the available material on the company. There was a lot of it, more as far as I could tell than on any other company in the modern era. For years United Fruit had attracted a great deal of attention. Myriad articles, academic dissertations and polemics between left and right had been devoted to it. United Fruit had even made the leap into literature, not that it would have chosen to. Pablo Neruda was from Chile, in South America, and well away from United Fruit’s sphere of influence, yet in 1950 he felt inspired to include a critique of the company in his epic poem about the Americas, Canto General. Through such attention, United Fruit had entered Latin American folklore. García Márquez had illustrated the point in the 1960s. Also, Miguel Ángel Asturias, from Guatemala, had written his novel, The Green Pope, about United Fruit’s exploits in his country and had won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1967.
By the mid-1970s the hostile debate that United Fruit had long prompted had died down. The company had transformed into being more a matter for cultured reflection than fiery invective. Maybe, I dared to presume, El Pulpo wasn’t quite the tentacled power it had once been. Then something happened as if itself an act of magical realism. After a sudden, almost violent upsurge of interest in United Fruit around the time of Black’s suicide, the company vanished.
The famously moral, late and departed chief of United Fruit hadn’t been what he had seemed. He had bribed members of the military government of Honduras. He had calculated that, in their country’s hour of need after Hurricane Fifi, a small inducement – one and a quarter million dollars – might encourage them to pull Honduras out of the banana cartel that had waged war on United Fruit.
Historically, this was a very United Fruit thing to do. ‘Fruit company bribes Central American militarist’ had become over the years less the stuff of news than a statement of the obvious. Yet the transgression provoked a storm of opprobrium, a whirlwind of moral outrage. Strangely enough, this was not from United Fruit’s most obvious enemies – bolshie students, academic polemicists and Latin American magic realists – but from its own kind.
Wall Street was outraged. The company’s shares crashed. The financial authorities muscled in to seize its books, to prevent ‘its further violation of the law’. The cry went up that United Fruit was up to its old tricks again from quarters willing to overlook them in the past. The effect was to drive United Fruit out of the temple. It was as if a death squad from the company’s old Central American area had ‘disappeared’ it off the streets. United Fruit’s anti-democratic tendencies in the past had done much to encourage death squad activities. Now events followed a familiar pattern. Quickly everyone stopped talking about the victim in anything but whispers; soon they did not mention it at all. Had it ever been there?
As for Eli Black, more details emerged on how he had met his end. To smash his office window he had used his briefcase, which was laden with papers and heavy books. He had thrown the briefcase out of the window, the papers scattering for blocks around and retrieved by the postal and emergency workers who had been engaged in the clear-up. One scrap was the nearest anyone found to a suicide note. On it Black had written ‘early retirement, 55’, suggesting he had plans to leave the company, or others had such plans for him.
It materialised that Black had lost the confidence of his senior managers, who had been trying to get him out of the company and into retirement. As a face-saving measure they had approached the State Department, in its capacity as guardian of the US’s foreign and diplomatic affairs, asking if any overseas ambassadorships were up for renewal. The names of a number of countries came back in reply, the most likely of which was Costa Rica. There remains no way of knowing whether Black would have taken the post, or if Costa Rica would have taken someone from United Fruit. But it was the country where United Fruit’s story had begun a century before.
In the circularity of his masterwork, it seemed that García Márquez might have predicted United Fruit’s fate. The author had referred to his imaginary Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude as a ‘city of mirrors (or mirages)’. How United Fruit had maintained its rule had been an exercise in smoke and mirrors, a huge confidence trick as practised by a collection of chancers and charlatans, philanthropists and fakirs. Yet, in singular fashion, the United Fruit Company had for a century somehow controlled a vast domain. Finally, the company, like Macondo, had been struck by a biblical hurricane and, with disaster imminent, its last character had engaged in a deranged search for meaning, knowing he was not going to get out of it alive. In its heyday one of the most formidable companies in the world, United Fruit had been ‘wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men’.
But exiles can return.
* Never let such sober interpretation, however, get in the way of a good commercial idea. ‘Banana Republic’ has more lately been employed as the name of a chain of mid-range clothing stores.
2
Lament for a Dying Fruit
Bananas are cheap and all around us, but they don’t grow on trees. With no woody trunk or bough, the banana is a plant, a herb and the world’s tallest grass. Rodgers and Hammerstein further confused the issue in South Pacific with their evocation of a primitive island paradise and ‘bananas you can pick right off a tree’. The fruit does not ripen well when still on the plant and tends to grow sour. It is best picked and shipped when green. Normally bananas come from a plantation in a very distant country to point of sale within twelve to thirteen days, three hundred hours, of cutting. Any later and they start to rot. The vast majority of bananas arrive in good time and see out their last days before market in industrial ripening rooms.
Hot and damp are the banana’s preferred conditions for growth, such as those found in the coastal lowlands of the tropics. Central America’s Atlantic coast is therefore perfect. Bananas rarely grow outside the tropics. Israel is one exception and Iceland another, in proximity to its steaming geysers. Florida was once tried as a banana location but its occasional frosts proved the experiment’s unravelling. Bananas thrive in rich sandy loam and, since they grow in areas where it rains a lot, need good drainage. Banana plants enjoy the ambiance of swamp but not actually being in it; they cannot survive standing in water.
Banana plants grow to a height of between two and a half and nine metres. The taller they are, the more vulnerable they are to hurricanes. To grow them, cuttings are taken from the underground stems of mature plants and planted. A month later a tight roll of leaves appears. As they grow, these rolls unfurl, quite fast, every six to twelve days and look like large drooping feathers. The pulpy, fibrous ‘trunk’ of the banana plant is really the stalks of these leaves. Full-grown leaves, or fronds, are up to three metres long and sixty centimetres wide and have a certain sweeping elegance, until they split across and start to look untidy.
After ten months a large bud appears from the unrolling leaves, at the end of a stem. The bud itself is made up of small purple leaves that pull back to reveal clusters of small flowers. These clusters grow into tiny banana bunches. Bunches are ‘hands’, the bananas called ‘fingers’. They grow at eight to twenty fingers per hand and five to ten hands per stem. As the stems become heavier, they bend down and droop towards the ground, and as the bananas grow larger they curve upwards.
Four to five months later the fruit is harvested by cutting the stem down. The violated stem gives off a sticky juice. Experienced stem carriers, often known in the trade as ‘backers’, will wear an appropriate hat to avoid having this juice leak into their hair. I shampooed mine thoroughly every day and bleached it dry in the afternoon sun. It looked great for a while. After a few weeks, my hair fell out.
Bananas grow in distant realms, mysterious places, out of sight and mind. They flourish in areas hostile to man, malarial regions, full of mosquitoes. It is said that if you wipe a mosquito bite with the inside of a banana skin it will ease the itch. I’ve tried it and it worked for me. We attribute to bananas all sorts of qualities, real and imagined.
Bananas have been said to solve virtually every health problem: obesity, blood pressure, depression, constipation. They have natural sugars for lasting energy, potassium to regulate blood sugar levels, fibre for the bowels. They lift the mood or alternatively calm you down, containing the neurotransmitters dopamine and seratonin that, respectively, replicate Ecstasy and Prozac.
Bananas stand for ‘peace and love’. Donovan sang about this in the 1960s in ‘Mellow Yellow’. According to his song’s lyrics, the banana was capable of ‘electrical’ effect. To achieve it, the counter-culture smoked the scraped and dried innards of banana skins, or so it was said.
The banana makes us laugh. In a light-hearted way it is associated with insanity: ‘going bananas’, says the Oxford English Dictionary, entered linguistic currency in 1935. Comedy had a great deal of fun with the fruit: Charlie Chaplin and many others slipped on it. From the 1920s to the 1950s music halls ran riot with it: ‘Have a banana!’ It was perhaps suggestive but difficult to take seriously. Banana humour is of the type featured on ‘dirty’ postcards of the 1950s sent from outreaches of England’s disappeared holiday land like Clacton and Bognor Regis.
In the US Carmen Miranda danced and sang with bananas to great acclaim in her films of the 1930s and 1940s. In one, The Gang’s All Here, her female chorus laid around her waving huge make-believe bananas between their legs. The scene ended with an explosion of tropical fruit from her tutti-frutti hat.
Bananas speak to our insecurities, male in particular. Are we up to it? United Fruit used to make play of this in its advertising. No banana of less than nine inches, it boasted, was fit for requirements. Of course, the company presented this as pure statement of fact; salacious interpretation would not have been of its doing. With phallic symbolism in mind, manuals on etiquette at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries taught well-bred American ladies the correct way to eat bananas. On drawing back the skin, this was not by way of direct conveyance to the mouth. Nor was the fruit to be touched by the fingers. A silver knife and fork were used to cut and duly dispatch the banana in bite-sized pieces. Any gentleman in attendance at such a ritual might have had cause to shift uncomfortably in his chair.
The banana manages to mask much of its subliminal side with assumed qualities of innocence. Advertisements in the 1950s and 1960s on British commercial television, still a novel phenomenon at the time, invited you to ‘Unzip a Banana’. Was any connection drawn between zipping and zippers? We wouldn’t consciously have thought about it. Anyway, fly buttons were still the norm.
In the late 1950s Harry Belafonte had a huge hit with the ‘Banana Boat Song’, a calypso about stevedores in the Caribbean approaching the end of their night shift: ‘Dayy-O!’ It all sounded like they were having a great deal of fun. Listening to it in Britain, I had no grasp of why anyone would want to leave such a place. Yet it was already over a decade since in 1948 the Windrush, a banana boat, had brought the first shipment of Caribbean migrants seeking work and a new life in England. In 1958 there had been ‘race riots’ in the Notting Hill district of London with the immigrant community alleged to be ‘stealing our jobs’ and – perhaps more significantly – ‘stealing our women’.
As for the banana’s innocence being confounded by coups d’état and other such political machinations in the regions where it is grown, we simply wouldn’t have known of such a thing. (Incidentally, no one laughs at the banana in its areas of origin. It is far too serious a business, on which jobs and lives depend. When I worked in Central America, I never heard one banana joke.)
The banana spans our history of imperfection from the fanciful origins of man to the modern consumer society. Scholarly observations on the matter have suggested that it was probably a banana leaf, rather than a fig leaf, that Adam and Eve wore in the Garden of Eden to hide their shame. The fig leaf might have looked most appropriate, but would have been too difficult to attach to the body. The banana leaf, with its superior ability to drape and wrap around things, was far more suited to the part.
When it comes to our contemporary shopping preferences, there are few more popular items than the banana. It has long since outstripped the apple as our favourite fruit. Recent claims have gone further, rating the banana among the most popular products on supermarket shelves. One study, which presumably set aside such dull basics of life as milk and bread, suggested that the only products beating the banana on to our supermarket shopping lists were petrol and lottery tickets. Whether these qualify as true supermarket items may be a moot point, but, either way, what is an exotic and apparently marginal piece of fruit stakes an extraordinary claim on consumer affections.
Clement Attlee, Britain’s prime minister in the early years after the Second World War, had a United Fruit shipload of bananas brought over in 1945 to herald the idea of a bright new future. This was to be ‘Social Democracy’ and the ‘welfare state’ and the boat had a banana on board for each child and pregnant mother of the land. His gesture, however, was taken in other ways. Evelyn Waugh, the novelist, saw it in more melancholic terms, of a lost and glorious past. When the bananas arrived for his three children, he had his wife serve the fruit with rare cream and sugar and scoffed the lot in front of them. (His son Auberon later wrote that he had not taken anything his father had to say on faith and morals very seriously thereafter.)
The British public at large was less disposed to view the bananas as a gift from a benevolent state than as a promise of greater luxuries to come. They would remain disappointed for some while. Attlee delivered his greatest triumph three years later, the National Health Service, and I was born in the first week of it in an English stately home converted into a hospital. 1948 was the year when Britain’s post-war austerity reached a height, along with the public’s frustration with it. By then the subversive banana had long since slipped in beneath the wire and people were hankering for more of the TVs, fridges, cars and other goods they heard everyone had in America.
In some areas the banana’s weird allure lasted for the duration of the Cold War and beyond. In Eastern Europe bananas became the symbol of ‘The West’. Longer queues formed for them in the Soviet Union than for other foods. In East Germany people laid out virtual altars of bananas, keeping them for as long as possible to be looked at or offered to honoured guests. Rare visitors from the West found themselves mystified by the solemn ceremony that accompanied such a seemingly commonplace gift.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 freelance opportunists were first into the breach, relieving East Berliners of their five free Western Deutschmarks in exchange for bananas. The East Berliners didn’t care. They bought them, ate them and marched on to the other side. Many sang and chanted as they went: ‘Hold my hand, and take me to Banana Land’.
Contrary to its appearance as a primitive thing of nature, the banana we know is nothing of the kind. United Fruit created it. The company took bananas out of their jungle environment – they don’t grow particularly well there – and put them into huge plantations, for mass production and mass consumption.
The banana is of the botanical genus Musa and has some three hundred varieties. One wild type, Musa acuminata is a giant jungle herb containing a mass of hard seeds that make it all but inedible. Musa paradisiaca is among the long macho varieties associated with Afro-Caribbean cuisine. Dessert bananas include the stubby Red Macabu and the small yellow Lady Finger. Another type dares to be named ‘Apple’. One tastes more like a pear. Bananas come short and long, while some are straight, as if to comply with a mythical regulation of the European Union. Another, the quadrilateral, is square.
