Banana (14 page)

B
Y THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY,
United Fruit was buckling under its own weight. It was looking less like a business concern and more like a staggering colonial power. The Guatemala escapade seemed especially ill-conceived, even if the banana giant felt it needed the land Arbenz had attempted to take over, as a hedge against spreading disease. For the most part, what United Fruit had accomplished was more about foreign policy than commerce, and changing times had made the supply-and-demand controls of international politics less important to what Americans ate than cultural forces within our own country. Tastes were changing. For the first time, banana consumption was declining, from a postwar high of just over 6 million bunches in 1947 to a low of 4.5 million nine years later, according to a Harvard Business School study. Potato chips and canned fruit cocktail were taking over.

Yet United Fruit's hunger for territory was unabated. The company's Panama disease “strategy” of flooding, replanting, and breaking new ground was failing to even maintain level output: By the mid-1950s, according to historian Marcelo Bucheli, the number of tons of bananas each acre yielded had dropped by more than half in some banana-producing nations.

There was a domino effect associated with Guatemala, but it wasn't what the banana giant intended. The fruit company's favored status had been restored, but the operation caused fear and outrage in neighboring countries. They began to chafe at United Fruit's dominance. They'd also learned the lessons of the Arbenz episode. United Fruit would still exert significant control over many of these countries, especially Honduras, but as the McCarthy era ended and the hottest spots of the cold war moved to Southeast Asia, small signs of independence—legislation that increased workers' rights and even the creation of some independent banana producers—emerged. (None of this meant peace for Central America, however, where civil wars, dictatorships, and right-wing governments, propped up by the U.S., were the norm through the 1980s.)

Even our own government seemed to be having mixed feelings about the banana giant. Less than two years after Arbenz was deposed, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against United Fruit. The reason for the action seems especially odd: “The Federal government had charged that United Fruit had obtained control of almost all land in Central and South America used for banana growing,” Bucheli writes. United Fruit didn't deny the claim; it argued that the U.S. government had no authority over foreign operations—that these land-ownership issues were the responsibility of local governments. Attempts to break up the world's largest banana grower continued through the early 1960s, when it was forced to divest itself of its railroad holdings in banana-growing countries and its supermarket distribution network in the United States. The final settlement also forced the company to sell some of the land it owned. Its first choice for offloading was Guatemala. The government's newly mixed attitude toward United Fruit, which it had previously promoted with as much fervor as it advanced (and continues to advance, to the present day) the interests of U.S. oil companies, was a huge policy change, though there was no clear reason or consistency to the levels of support and opposition in those shifting foreign, trade, and economic policies.

AT TIMES, THE COMPANY'S BEHAVIOR
,
too, was especially irrational. In 1957 it claimed to have beaten Panama disease in Costa Rica for a second time, reopening a plantation near Golfito on the Pacific coast. The
New York Times
reported that all of the company's “acreage has now been rehabilitated.” It wasn't the case. Golfito was reinfected within months. Top-heavy and distracted by its own size, in a state of both amnesia—it seemed to forget that its mission was to sell bananas—and denial, United Fruit clung to the Gros Michel despite failure after failure of the attempts to protect it from the blight. United Fruit was no longer invincible. It had been beaten by itself, through greed and ego—but mostly it had been defeated by nature. The disease it sowed had overtaken it.

It didn't have to be that way. And there was another banana company that knew it.

STANDARD FRUIT WAS SMALLER THAN UNITED FRUIT
—it never controlled more than 20 percent of the U.S. banana market—but it had a similar history. The company was started in 1899 by a pair of Sicilian immigrants. Salvador D'Antoni was a sometime smuggler and gun runner who operated mostly off the northern coast of Honduras. Joseph Vaccaro, who'd later corner the Southern ice market, was a New Orleans–based fruit distributor. When D'Antoni's first shipment of bananas—grown on the island of Roatan, near the coast of current-day Belize, then known as British Honduras—was snapped up by eager consumers, Vaccaro, like his northern counterpart Andrew Preston and future rival Samuel Zemurray, jumped at the opportunity. After partnering with D'Antoni, Vaccaro Brothers and Company became the largest banana grower in northern Honduras, centered around the port city of La Ceiba.

Vaccaro's enterprise quickly became a scaled-down version of United Fruit, building seaports, railroads, and communications facilities. Vaccaro copied another United Fruit tactic as well: using tough, intimidating, and sometimes bloody methods to maintain control over growing areas. In order to gain working capital for railroad building, Vaccaro enlisted the help of local merchants, who—excited by the banana gold rush—put up both cash and their land in return for shares of the newly formed Vaccaro Brothers and Company. By 1903 the company was earning huge profits, and the investors began to demand their rightful portion. Instead, according to Honduran author Antonio Canelas, writing in
La Ceiba, sus raíces y su historia
(La Ceiba, its Roots and its History), Vaccaro ordered the town's city hall to be burned down, along with any records of land ownership and business agreements contained inside. With the support of the Honduran government, the banana importer was able to make a blank slate of the region—over which he took control. By 1925 the company had become United Fruit's most formidable competitor, with a new name—the Standard Fruit and Steamship Company—and an operational distribution network in the United States. United Fruit was an early investor in the company but was forced to divest itself after regulators objected. Standard became the larger banana grower's “powerful and alert rival,” according to Frederick Upham Adams, ensuring that the company had “absolutely no control over retail prices.” (Adams, whose writing was generally slanted in favor of the banana giant, was correct in his description of the smaller company but not in his claim that the monetary value of bananas was beyond the ability of the Octopus to sway. The competition tended to be over markets rather than cost.)

Until the 1950s, Standard Fruit remained an operational clone of the larger grower. Panama disease hit its plantations in 1910. Abandonment began four years later, and the company also began acquiring territory, moving growing areas farther and farther inland.

But Standard Fruit's smaller size amplified the crisis. It didn't have a half-dozen countries and tens of thousands of acres of untouched land to clear and transform into banana farms. The cost of managing remote plantations on substandard land threatened to price the company, today known as Dole, out of business.

In the end, that hardship turned out to be the smaller banana company's biggest advantage. It knew that it soon would run out of places to grow Gros Michel. That would mean an end to the enterprise—unless it found a replacement banana. In 1927 it began searching for a new, Panama disease–resistant fruit. The candidates it tested were no different from the ones United Fruit had been rejecting. But because Vaccaro's company had more to lose, it looked further into each breed. In January 1927, 108 Lacatan banana plants—related to the Philippine favorite—were planted. By September they were ready for harvest. The Lacatan that were good were great, just as they are today, but there were numerous problems: The darker-colored bananas required rigidly regulated ripening, using ethylene gas, the natural vapor that fruits give off as they ripen. The presence of the gas is a trigger for the ripening process, which is why, if you want green bananas to turn yellow quickly, you can put them in a brown paper bag with an overripe apple. The apple gives off ethylene, and the bananas mature. But banana distributors in the United States were unwilling to implement such methods: With United Fruit delivering thousands of healthy Gros Michel bunches to U.S. ports, it didn't seem necessary. Lacatan had other problems, according to Standard Fruit researcher H. H. V. Hord. It was very sensitive to temperature and humidity, and small variations could cause individual fruit to drop off the bunches during transport. Despite this, Standard began shipping small quantities of Lacatan to the United States. There was nothing else to do with the land it owned.

THE NEXT BANANA
the company tried was the Dwarf Cavendish, a smaller relative of the breed that would ultimately replace the Gros Michel. This pint-sized fruit had better ripening characteristics than Lacatan, though it had what Hord described as an “ashy” color. The fruit also bruised easily. But it grew even better than Lacatan, and like that variety, became part of Standard Fruit's product line.

The company even attempted to market a man-made banana, shipping the IC2 developed in Trinidad to the United States in 1944. By 1950 nearly half a million bunches were exported from Honduras to New Orleans. The fruit resisted both Panama disease and Sigatoka, and possessed the hardiness needed for the long journeys from the tropics to supermarkets. But IC2 was hard to grow—it stumbled in anything less than top-quality soil—and when later generations of the bred banana began succumbing to Panama disease, Standard Fruit halted shipments.

Two more candidates remained, and both were promising. The Bout Rond banana, first grown in Puerto Rico, was tasty, ripened well, and looked like Gros Michel. Bout Rond had one characteristic that made it an especially good choice as the Gros Michel plantations thinned: It could be planted in the same fields, gradually replacing the older variety, requiring no changes in infrastructure. But, like every other potential Gros Michel successor, other qualities were lacking. The fruit withstood Sigatoka poorly, it could bruise and rot easily in cargo holds, and it didn't like cool temperatures. In the field, Bout Rond banana plants blew down easily in high winds. Because of these problems, the Bout Rond stood little chance of replacing the entire Latin American banana crop.

But the Bout Rond, Lacatan, and other small-scale bananas Standard Fruit experimented with weren't just abandoned because they were inadequate. By 1958 they were no longer needed. That second candidate—the one that eventually won the race—was Cavendish.

U
NITED FRUIT KNEW WHAT THE CAVENDISH WAS.
They hated it. Thomas McCann, who'd spent over twenty years working as an image-maker for the banana giant—he was the one who allegedly helped distribute phony photographs of dead bodies to the press during the Guatemalan war—wrote in his 1976 memoir that the company believed the Cavendish, along with any company that sold them, would be “thrown out” of supermarkets across the nation. The company that invented banana innovation—and had therefore invented the modern banana—had become hidebound, lumbering, and unable to change.

Instead of seriously considering a replacement banana, the largest banana company cracked the whip on its workers—enforcing strict quotas on productions, trying to squeeze every last Gros Michel out of every last acre of plantation.

Standard Fruit couldn't afford to do that. In 1939 sample Cavendish plants were imported to Honduras from Santos, Brazil, where they'd been grown for local consumption. Wartime interrupted the test, but by 1947 the company began exports of the Giant Cavendish banana.

Turning the Cavendish into a Gros Michel replacement was not a sure thing. The Cavendish had advantages over the original commercial banana: It was entirely resistant to Panama disease and, unlike the Bout Rond, held up fairly well in hurricanes. The Cavendish was susceptible to a host of maladies—everything from the Sigatoka fungus to bacterial infections, along with caterpillars, aphids, and beetles—but these were mostly controllable. And because the Cavendish plant wasn't as tall as the banana it would ultimately replace, it was easier to saturate with Bordeaux mixture.

THE CAVENDISH ALSO LOOKED
and tasted right. A ripe Cavendish wasn't exactly the same, either in the hand or on the palate, as Gros Michel. But it was close—close enough.

With the Sigatoka fungus, bacterial infections, and pests under control, there was only one—huge—problem. The Cavendish that resisted the most virulent enemy its species had was, in another way, a fragile thing. Gros Michel bunches could be thrown in cargo holds and shipped on rough seas without bruising or breaking, as long as they were kept cool. As we know from the mushy spots that appear after a mild jostling in our grocery bags, the Cavendish is nowhere near as hardy.

Without another option, Standard Fruit's engineers tried to find a way to make the Cavendish travel better. What they accomplished, in the decade following World War II, was a revolution. They reinvented the banana industry.

TODAY, THAT SOLUTION
appears so simple that it almost seems laughable: Ship the Cavendish not on stems but in boxes. Doing so, however, required a complete overhaul of an infrastructure that had been built up for over half a century. While United Fruit's CEO was busy attending mass at New York's Saint Patrick's Cathedral with Guatemalan president Carlos Castillo Armas, and the company's official policy was still to drench plantations across Central America, Standard Fruit was making the Cavendish work. Historian John Soluri points out that the smaller grower, despite calling boxed fruit “the greatest innovation in the history of the banana industry,” didn't invent the process. It had previously been used in the Canary Islands. Nevertheless, Soluri writes, “boxed fruit marked the beginning of a new phase in export banana production and marketing.”

After numerous tests, Standard determined that an ideally sized banana box would be a little larger than a milk crate, capable of holding forty pounds of fruit. In order to get the fruit into the cartons, it now had to be processed in the field, at packing houses built for that purpose. This decentralized preparatory step meant that fruit was better shipped in trucks, by road. That development would ultimately spell the end of the Central American railroads that had put United Fruit in business in the first place. Boxed fruit was also easier to deliver. In orderly stacks, ripening and cooling became more efficient. Codes on the banana boxes meant that the journey of a particular load of fruit could be tracked from plantation to grocery shelf.

Boxing yielded another hidden advantage: Since bunches were broken up and handled individually, they could also be branded more efficiently as consumer products. Grocers had previously sold Gros Michel by hanging entire bunches of the fruit, straight from distributors, in their stores. Now they could arrange individual hands into attractive, modern supermarket displays. Standard Fruit launched its newly boxed fruit under the brand name “Cabana Banana” and began applying stickers to individual fingers as they were placed into boxes at the packing house.

The empire built by Andrew Preston, Minor Keith, and Sam Zemurray was falling apart. United Fruit's profit dropped from $66 million in 1950 to $33.5 million in 1955 and to just $2.1 million in 1960. By then, Sam the Banana Man's power had diminished. The former mogul died from Parkinson's disease a year later. A new chief executive, Thomas Sunderland, took power. His first order: adopt the Cavendish.

THOUGH IT ARRIVED LATE
,
United Fruit was a quick study, copying every technique its smaller rival had developed. It began testing Cavendish varieties in 1960, initially settling on a type known as Valery. By the mid-1960s, the changeover was complete. The switch remade United Fruit. In an effort to “reintroduce” itself to American consumers, the company launched one of the most successful marketing campaigns in American history. It changed its mascot from a female-like singing fruit into a musical, wiggling, and busty señorita. Like Standard Fruit, it began putting stickers on individual bananas.

The final Gros Michel bananas to reach the United States were sold in 1965. By then, the entire industry had transformed. Working conditions improved (though they still were far from perfect). United Fruit began to sell much of the land it had taken over during the previous seventy years: The policy of direct control that had driven the company for decades had ultimately failed to either stop disease or please governments. Today's banana industry, with U.S. companies purchasing fruit from local subcontractors, who actually own and operate the plantations, emerged. That market diversification allowed Standard Fruit to compete on a more equal footing. Energized by its success with the Cavendish, it began to catch up to its rival.