Banana (11 page)

W
ILSON POPENOE WAS DETERMINED
that his voice not be ignored. He'd become obsessed with plants as a boy, while working in his father's greenhouse near Pasadena, California. By the time he was twenty, he was an agricultural prodigy, with an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly every fruit and vegetable grown in the United States and an intense desire that his understanding should encompass the entire world. When Cornell University offered him a full scholarship, Popenoe turned it down, deciding instead to travel the Americas and Asia for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he was given a title never before bestowed on anyone: plant developer. The self-taught scientist literally changed landscapes wherever he went. In 1913 he helped establish orange crops in Brazil. In Brazil, Ecuador, Honduras, and Guatemala, he planted coconuts, olives, figs, and Thai rambutan. In 1923 he married archaeologist Dorothy Hughes, and the two continued to travel—with Dorothy providing pen-and-ink drawings to accompany Wilson's photographs and written reports.

The couple's wanderings made them especially aware of the desperate conditions plantation and farm workers faced across the world. In one of his reports, Wilson Popenoe noted the mistreatment of black laborers on South African farms. When Dorothy Popenoe took a solo trip to Panama, she attempted to take a picture of a local woman kneeling by a stream but was rebuffed. “She didn't like Americans,” she wrote in a letter to Wilson. “I was reminded of your tale of the Guatemalan Indian, who wanted nothing but to be left alone.” Instead, the “Indians” of Central America were picking bananas.

In 1925 Popenoe was hired by United Fruit to open a research station in Lancetilla, a few miles from the company's Honduran headquarters in Tela. It was a curious job for someone who'd expressed so much sympathy for the exploited, but the scientist was determined that his work could aid people working at both the highest and lowest levels of the banana industry. His primary assignment wasn't to breed a resistant banana, it was to collect them, gathering samples of both wild and local fruit from around the world, and return them to Honduras for experimentation. As a hedge, the self-made plant expert was charged with a secondary task: determining what crops might be grown on land ruined by Panama disease—or even in the entire region, if bananas completely vanished. His proposed replacement crops included rubber, a dozen kinds of timber, the oil palm, and cocoa, all of which are now grown across wide stretches of Central America.

Some of Popenoe's projects benefited United Fruit at the highest—and most personal—levels. When Sam Zemurray wanted to curry favor with Honduran president Tiburcio Carías Andino, he ordered Popenoe to develop a local breed of tobacco that could compete with product from Cuba. Whether Popenoe succeeded is still debated, but what is certain today is that any American connoisseur who wants to stay within the law is indebted to Popenoe: The Honduran product is as close as one can get to a Havana stogie. Popenoe also collected poisonous snakes—but not for fun. He knew that snakebites were common, especially among banana workers, and developed one of the world's largest collections of antivenin.

Popenoe left multiple legacies. The descendants of the fruit from his banana collection are still used as basic stock in the attempt to create resistant breeds. And North Americans owe Popenoe a debt every time we scoop up a chip with guacamole. He planted the first successful avocado crops in the hemisphere (though they remained largely an expensive import until after World War II, when California finally caught up. Even then, said a 1950 report by the state's Avocado Society, growers remained “dependent on Wilson Popenoe”). Popenoe made huge strides in advancing native control of Latin America's agricultural destiny. The scientist managed to convince United Fruit to donate $3 million in order to found the Pan-American School of Agriculture (and even more amazingly, he got the fruit company to agree
not
to hire the institution's graduates, ensuring that the locally trained plant experts would serve public, rather than corporate, interests).

The final thing Popenoe left behind is the most problematic. The botanic gardens he planted at Lancetilla are still open today. One of the more pleasant ways to get to them is to rent a bike in Tela and pedal to the facility along dirt roads, through deeply shaded bamboo forest. Guest cabins can be rented there, and though they aren't air conditioned, a visitor can cool off with a quick dip into the Lancetilla River. The gardens are gorgeous and quiet. They're Popenoe's most lovely creation, and it is hard to imagine that anything malicious—even if it was not intended to be so—could have been created there.

In many ways, Popenoe was a pure scientist. As sympathetic as he was to native causes, his job was to solve problems. Sometimes that meant not being able to see that immediate success might do long-term harm. The oil palm is a good example of that. Though it initially helped revitalize land left fallow by Panama disease, it has now become so widespread in Central America that it is responsible for much of the region's deforestation. For bananas, Popenoe helped create an even more controversial legacy: It is called Bordeaux mixture.

I
T WASN'T JUST THAT
Panama disease was so virulent that any attempt to control it seemed futile. Banana growers were soon finding other things to worry about. In 1935 a new banana-killing pathogen appeared. In many ways, Sigatoka, which was first described in Fiji (the disease is named after a river on that South Pacific island), was even more insidious than the better-known fungus that had been spreading across Latin America for over three decades. Though it killed plants outright, just as Panama disease did, it could also—if fruit was harvested at the earliest, invisible stages of infection—strike while the fruit was in transport. Bananas loaded unblemished would arrive at market in various states of rot, ranging from mild softness to massive discoloration, along with a foul taste and odor. Even worse, Sigatoka was not spread on shoes and tools or in soil and water.

The pathogen was airborne. That meant it moved at a pace much quicker than Panama disease. From a single Honduran plantation, Sigatoka expanded through the region's entire banana crop—vulnerable, as always, because each fruit was a clone of the other—with astonishing rapidity. The banana industry had recently begun to open huge operations in the virgin, Panama disease–free soil along the canal nation's Pacific coast. The project went well, and several years later the earlier infection had yet to arrive. But when Sigatoka appeared, the entire region was wiped out in a matter of weeks.

But faster and more toxic as it was, Sigatoka was different from Panama disease in one critical respect: United Fruit was able to find a cure. Copper sulfate—you might have used it in a high school science experiment, growing blue crystals from the substance in a baby-food jar—was quickly found to stop the new malady in the lab. The technical problem was how to apply it to the banana fields. Ordinary crop-dusting didn't provide enough coverage. Instead, the company—in a research effort led by Wilson Popenoe—was able to modify a formula used by French winemakers, mixing the powerful chemical with lime and oil so it could be turned into a fine spray. Even then, applying it was a huge technological challenge, but it was the kind of task United Fruit had always been good at.

The substance known as Bordeaux mixture led to a chemical re-taking of the tropics. “To deliver the necessary enormous quantities—250 gallons per acre, twenty to thirty times a year—United Fruit created a fungicide infrastructure of phaeronic scale,” wrote Steve Marquardt in a 2002 issue of the
Latin American Research Review
. The company had to install miles and miles of piping, thousands of pumps, and reel after reel of firehoses and nozzles. A quarter of United Fruit's workers were pulled from picking and packing, and turned into pesticide sprayers. “Fields,” Marquardt notes, “turned into factories.” Pesticides have been used for thousands of centuries, but United Fruit's industrialization of the process was the final part of an infamous trio of “innovations” that, in less than two decades, transformed the way people controlled—and reacted to—agricultural maladies. Aerial spraying was invented in 1922. It was followed, ten years later, by the first crop experiments with DDT. The use of Bordeaux mixture became widespread in the years just prior to World War II.

THE CAMPAIGN TO CONTROL SIGATOKA
had an unexpected fringe benefit for the banana company: Such an effort was too expensive to be mounted by small plantation owners. The disease, and the “cure,” helped United Fruit squeeze most of its last few remaining competitors out of business, leaving the Central American banana market to itself and the much-smaller (and untouchable, thanks to antitrust laws) Standard Fruit.

The bananas benefited. The banana growers benefited. American consumers benefited. The only people in the fruit's supply chain to be harmed by the disease were the banana workers themselves. Already burdened by near-indentured status, with substandard housing, poor medical care, and no ability to organize, they now faced a much more insidious threat: Bordeaux mixture made them sick. Workers would return from the field with their skin literally turned blue by the heavy spraying (a nickname for a Bordeaux mixture–stained
bananero
was
perico
, or “parakeet”; they were as brightly colored as the common tropical bird). No longer was the biggest immediate health risk faced by banana workers an industrial accident—a wound from a machete or a mishap on a loading dock. After a few months of exposure, workers could no longer scrub the blue tint from their flesh. They'd lose their sense of smell and their ability to hold down food.

Then they died.

“Pervasive fear of the respiratory effects of Bordeaux inhalation fostered an enduring trope in Central American anti–United Fruit literature and journalism: the skeletal, tubercular former
perico
, dying alone in an urban slum or on the fringes of the plantation zone,” Marquardt writes. It was, he notes, a “macabre exchange”: human lives traded for bananas. The misery was hardly abated by the fact that United Fruit paid the workers applying the fungicide much more than an ordinary banana worker would earn. Many poor workers took up the offer—with fatal consequences.

THE FIGHT AGAINST PANAMA DISEASE
wasn't going nearly as well. Convinced that irrigation was the key to sweeping the fusarium fungus out of the fields, United Fruit engineers began constructing extensive hydraulic systems—moats and dams, canals and levees—powered by gigantic pumps.

There was great optimism about these efforts, and, combined with the Sigatoka spraying apparatus, it seemed that the war against the jungle had finally, permanently been won. A company newsletter, Marquardt notes, boasted that control had at last been asserted over “creeping, progress-consuming, tropical Mother Nature.”

Once again, the company's most powerful enemy punished that overconfidence. Irrigation did provide a brief respite from Panama disease—then it boomeranged. Water
spread
the fungus. By 1950 Panama disease was moving faster than ever before. (An inconvenient truth, if there ever was one.) Even so, company managers continued to cling to their miracle cure. The failures, they believed, were only because not enough water was being applied.

What began as drenching became torrential. The technique was called “flood fallowing.” It was nothing less than creating huge, artificial lakes—building earthen sluices around entire plantations and filling them three feet deep in an attempt to swamp the fungus. It was expensive, scarring to the land, and more than ineffective: All that water
did
kill large amounts of the Panama disease fungus, but it also destroyed almost everything else—including other fungi and bacteria—along with it. The scrubbed, drained fields would then provide a clean, competition-free vacuum for any malady strong enough to colonize quickly.

Panama disease fit the bill.

Whether victorious—as in the conquest of Sigatoka—or vanquished, the banana industry's attitudes seemed unchanged. From Minor Keith's conquest of the Panamanian jungles, through the overthrow of Honduras just before the First World War, to the harsh lesson taught to Colombia's workers in 1929, the Octopus knew only one way to wield power: bluntly, with brute force. Soon—once again at the behest of Sam Zemurray, the rough-and-tumble self-made billionaire who sat at the center of the business during its most turbulent and aggressive years—the banana industry would embark on its most complex, angry, and ultimately futile application of that philosophy.

T
O CALL THE SS
SIXAOLA
a banana boat is like calling the Grand Canyon a big ditch. Built in 1911, less than forty years after Lorenzo Dow Baker brought his first shipment of fruit from Jamaica aboard a ship powered by sails, the vessel was enormous: It was half as large as the
Titanic
, capable of holding five hundred railroad cars full of bananas. The
Sixaola
wasn't the only ship in the Great White Fleet that indicated how huge the public's appetite for bananas had become. Bigger vessels were being constructed at shipyards across America. Even the smallest of United Fruit's ships could carry thousands of times more fruit than Baker had.

But the
Sixaola
was United Fruit's seafaring pride. The vessel was named after a Panamanian river that emptied into Bocas del Toro, the natural harbor that was United Fruit's primary shipping point for much of the early twentieth century. For nearly thirty years following its launch, it had mostly plied the same route: from Panama to New Orleans, a journey of just a few days, through seas that were—except during hurricane season—nearly always calm.

All that changed in 1942.

When World War II broke out, American banana consumption was at an all-time high. It had grown every year since 1900. Desire for the fruit became even stronger in the 1930s: Unemployed workers might have sold apples in the street, but they still preferred to eat the cheaper banana. United Fruit had weathered the depression nearly unblemished. Under Sam Zemurray, the company gained nearly full control of the global market for bananas, even as the amount of work it had to do to evade Panama disease increased. When one plantation failed, another was built, a task that meant forging an entire settlement from scratch. Land needed to be cleared, railroad lines and telegraph lines needed to be extended. Housing, schools, and hospitals for workers had to be built, and infrastructure, including cattle ranches to breed livestock for food and donkeys for banana-field transport, sawmills and machine shops, water transport systems and power-generating stations all needed to be put into place. Executive perks were also carried over—sometimes literally, with structures disassembled, transported, and rebuilt so that each plantation had the golf courses, churches, restaurants, and, for single executives, brothels, often filled with underage girls, needed to create lifestyles most of the officials could neither have afforded nor gotten away with at home. United Fruit's minicolonies were a huge incentive when it came to bringing skilled managers to the otherwise less-than-comfortable-for-gringos tropics. They were also planning centers for some of the company's most terrible actions. When I sat with a former company executive in the dining room of what was the banana giant's country club outside San Pedro Sula, Honduras, he told me how he'd grown up—his father also worked for the company—in a United Fruit compound and how, at these very tables, “governments were made and broken in between rounds of golf.”

Some of the abandonments seemed to happen as rapidly as in places like Pompeii or the mysteriously empty Maya outposts in the jungles. Though Panama's Bocas del Toro still served as a shipping point, plantation operations were completely halted. Thousands of acres were left bare, and thousands of workers lost their jobs. In Honduras the huge shipping terminal of Puerto Castilla became a ghost town (a military base now occupies the area; the only remnant of United Fruit's reign is a falling-down former hospital surrounded by a high fence).

The oddest desertion of all was at Sosua in the Dominican Republic. After the village was left empty in 1940, President Rafael Trujillo offered it as a Jewish homeland—a safe zone at the beginning of the Holocaust. Plans were made to house 100,000 refugees. But the logistics of the plan were never worked out: Only five hundred families actually relocated to the island. Today, twenty-five remain, operating an active synagogue and the country's biggest dairy operation. Holstein and Jersey cows graze on pastureland that was once United Fruit plantations.

The first drop in banana demand since the founding of the industry came at the start of World War II. Fuel, milk, and meat were rationed, but some supplies were always available since they were produced within U.S. borders. Not bananas. They had to be shipped. Though Central America was free of hostilities, and the plantations could have kept operating at their normal pace, there were no vessels to bring the fruit back home. Most of the Great White Fleet was commandeered by the military. Those ships that continued in private service were forced to make a treacherous journey. German submarines patrolled the area. Cargo vessels traveled in convoys through what had been declared the Eastern Sea Frontier.

The
Sixaola
had already survived a near-fatal accident. Three years after it was built, it was drafted into service for World War I. The ship could carry 3 million tons of beef on a single transatlantic voyage. In February 1917, as she was being loaded in New York, the
Sixaola
caught fire. Two crewmen were killed, and the boat half-capsized in its Hudson River berth. After the war, the vessel was raised, refurbished, and returned to transporting bananas.

The
Sixaola
remained in United Fruit service as World War II began, making voyages from the United States to the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic. The ship's crew was constantly on edge during these voyages. Twice, the
Sixaola
was shadowed by German submarines.

The first incident occurred near Cape Race, at the tip of Newfoundland's Avalon Peninsula. Even in peacetime, the promontory was a place sailors tried to keep away from. It was shrouded in nearly perpetual fog and jutted far into the Atlantic. (A radio beacon at the Cape Race lighthouse was the first to hear a distress call from the
Titanic
.) Just off the cape, on the night of February 4, 1942, as it traveled from England to New York, the
Sixaola
's lookouts spotted a German craft. The U-boat followed the cargo vessel for several hours before veering off. A few days later, the ship—now heading south, along the coast of North Carolina—was chased again. This time, a pair of subs tailed the
Sixaola
for four hours, finally breaking away just after dawn.

Sinkings of cargo vessels had risen to several a week by the middle of the war. On June 12, 1942, the
Sixaola
set out from Panama filled with bananas, a shipment of trucks for the U.S. Army, and 201 passengers and crew. It had barely reached the coastline of Guatemala when a pair of German torpedos ripped into the ship's hull. The banana boat's captain, William Fagan, gave the abandon ship order two minutes later. Before everyone aboard could get into the lifeboats, the
Sixaola
's boilers exploded. Twenty-nine crew members died, including stewardess Edna Johansson; for her sacrifice, she became the first female recipient of the Merchant Marine Combat Bar. Forty-nine survivors not found during the initial rescue were lost at sea for four days before they finally drifted ashore.

“It was terrifying,” the ship's purser, Emmanuel Zammit, told the Cyber Diver News Network, “with all this debris flying over from the blast in the bow of the ship.” As he waited aboard the lifeboat for rescuers, Zammit heard the rumble of diesel engines; one of the German submarines surfaced directly in front of him. The U-boat's commander emerged on deck and asked whether the
Sixaola
was carrying only bananas or whether it was also transporting military cargo. The survivors refused to answer, and the subs were quickly chased away by approaching U.S. military vessels.

NINETEEN GREAT WHITE FLEET SHIPS
were sunk during the war. The human cost was high, but for a company as large as United Fruit, the damage was an opportunity to build even larger banana boats. A new
Sixaola
was christened two years after the war ended. It was painted white, but it was also emblazoned with a new symbol: an emblem that helped ensure the company's survival, dominance, and place amidst the mainstays of American culture. It was a blue oval, with the name Chiquita at the center.