Banana (26 page)

1920:
The Fruit Dispatch Company is formed to distribute bananas in the United States. Over the years, the company—a subsidiary of Chiquita and its predecessor entities—introduces numerous technological innovations that transform, and actually help build, America's consumer culture. The driving force is that the banana importers are succeeding at the impossible: bringing highly perishable, tropical fruit to northern consumers year-round. Over the years, Fruit Dispatch develops refrigerated shipping, central warehouses for supermarkets, and product-tracking systems that will ultimately morph into today's sophisticated retail technologies, such as bar coding and freshness dating.

1922:
Panama disease, in just under two decades, has spread to Australia, New Zealand, China, India, and the Canary Islands—basically following the same route that the earliest cultivated bananas did as they migrated west. Meanwhile, United Fruit's growing home economics department invents dried banana chips.

1923:
Songwriters Frank Silver and Irving Cohn score a hit with their song, “Yes, We Have No Bananas.” The lyric supposedly relates to the periodic shortages in banana supply that are beginning to crop up, the result of advancing difficulties in combating soil-based pathogens that destroy tropical crops. For the rest of the century, and through today, battling these pathogens becomes a more and more costly, intense, and difficult war for banana growers.

1924:
United Fruit prints recipes for corn flakes with banana slices and encourages cereal companies to include discount vouchers inside their boxes; it is the first supermarket coupon to be packaged with another product.

1925:
Panamanian banana workers go on strike; the rest of the nation soon follows. Bananas rot in the fields, the Panama Canal closes, and U.S. troops intervene.

1928:
The entire Central American banana industry experiences labor unrest. Strikes, worker riots, and demands for better wages and conditions will grow through the next decade—as will the measures taken by banana companies to squelch them.

1928:
The first human-bred banana is grown in Trinidad. This is one of the earliest attempts to find a replacement for the Gros Michel, the classic export banana that is rapidly succumbing to Panama disease.

1929:
A banana-workers strike in Colombia is brutally suppressed. Vigilante squads, sponsored by United Fruit and trained by the U.S. military, act against the strikers and terrorize the nation. The action leads directly to the violent guerilla battles between the right-wing descendants of those squads and the left-wing gangs—both supported by drug money—that plague Colombia today.

1930:
Banana companies build huge ripening rooms in the United States. Ethylene gas, a natural substance given off by ripening fruits, is used to control the level of ripeness. The rooms work by regulating temperature—cooler means the fruit matures slowly—while more ethylene hastens the process. The result is bananas that arrive at the market on their final green day, and which will last exactly seven days before turning brown. That such standardization could be introduced in a fruit is a symbol of how adept the banana companies are at manipulating and maximizing their profit potential.

1932:
United Fruit fires striking Honduran banana workers. The strike's organizer is assassinated.

1935:
Sigatoka disease is identified in Central America. This is the major blight facing today's global banana crops, but it is controllable (albeit with increasing and more expensive quantities of pesticides as the fungus develops resistance). The first attempt to control Sigatoka is with Bordeaux mixture, a toxic, thick, oily substance that causes illness in thousands of banana workers. At the same time, Panama disease devastates some Honduran fields so badly that an entire port-side town, Puerto Castillo, is abandoned. The strategy for dealing with the disease was to simply move operations to healthier areas; it was through this constant migration that banana companies cut down huge tracts of Central and South American tropical forest.

1935:
Banana companies make some effort to improve labor conditions, but their fundamental control of Central American nations remains intact. Use of the term
banana republic
becomes common after it appears in an article in
Esquire
magazine. Another name, little known in the U.S. but seen as the complementary and explanatory counterpoint to the emerging English coinage, is El Pulpo. The Spanish word for “octopus” specifically describes United Fruit.

1939:
In the United States, United Fruit begins to offer free textbooks to grade schools. The books are filled, of course, with information on bananas.

1941:
Much of the Great White Fleet is commandeered into service by the U.S. Navy for World War II. Unable to get significant quantities of product to market, the banana industry suffers huge losses.

1944:
As the war wanes, a new banana industry emerges: one that relies as much on marketing as it does on blunt tactics. The Chiquita brand name is introduced as part of this effort. The brand's famous jingle is inspired by the banana dances done by Brazilian bombshell Carmen Miranda, especially her over-the-top, suggestive number in Busby Berkeley's musical “The Gang's All Here.” The Chiquita jingle advises “never” to refrigerate a banana. Doing so, it warns, will make the bananas brown (true enough, but that it will also extend the fruit's life by a week isn't mentioned). The original Miss Chiquita Banana is a cartoon character drawn by Dik Brown, who later created
Hagar the Horrible
.

1946:
United Fruit owns nearly a million acres of land in Cuba, Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia.

1947:
Guatemala adopts a “worker protection code.” United Fruit describes it as “communistic.” The
New York Times Magazine
prints a recipe for bananas with ham, cheese, and mustard.

1950:
Pablo Neruda's
Canto General
, a cycle of 350 poems, includes an entire chapter of poetry about the suffering created by the actions of United Fruit. At the same time, Standard Fruit develops a cardboard box with handles and holes, similar to the one now used to ship every banana (and many other fruit varieties). The ability to box bananas will become a major advantage when the Gros Michel, finally wiped out by disease, is replaced by the more fragile Cavendish. This event is less than a decade away, but, except for a few new technologies and some threadbare research, the problem is mostly denied by banana executives.

1951:
Jacobo Arbenz becomes the first democratically elected leader of a Central American country. His ascendance to the presidency of Guatemala is not pleasing to the banana companies.

1952:
Arbenz nationalizes a quarter million acres of unused United Fruit land, leaving only productive fields under company possession. The act enrages the United Fruit board, which begins to search for a way to “solve” the Arbenz problem.

1953:
The first commercial Cavendish varieties are grown by Standard Fruit.

1953/1954:
Samuel Zemurray, the ostensibly retired United Fruit chairman who engineered the first banana company coup in Central America, finances the publication of a book called “Report on Guatemala.” The book, which seeks to prove that Arbenz is “under Moscow's control,” is distributed to every member of the U.S. Congress. Armed with the Zemurray-commissioned report, Congress urges President Truman to act on the “crisis” that appears to be threatening U.S. interests in Guatemala (and, in an early version of the Vietnam-era domino theory, throughout the rest of the region). Truman authorizes CIA action, including the compilation of a list of fifty-four Guatemalans—among them, Arbenz and other members of his government—who are to be “eliminated.” A coup is mounted, and the Arbenz government falls; Arbenz goes into exile. One of the witnesses to the coup is a young physician named Ernesto Guevara, who'll soon become one of the region's most prominent radicals, taking on the nickname “Che.” Over the next thirty years, the dictatorship that took over from Arbenz will seek to stamp out any form of leftist or agricultural activism. Over 200,000 Guatemalans, including many ethnic Mayas, are killed.

1955:
Fifteen million pieces of banana industry–produced literature are distributed to U.S. schoolchildren.

1957:
Green Prison
, a novel by Ramon Amaya Amador, is published in Honduras. It galvanizes workers with its accurate description of conditions on the banana plantations.

1958:
The end of the Gros Michel era nears. Chiquita scientists, after decades of denial, begin experimenting with replacements.

1959:
Chiquita begins sending scientists to Asia on collecting expeditions, hoping to find a suitable new banana for U.S. consumers.

1960:
Chiquita opens a research program in banana genetics and breeding at La Lima, Honduras. The program is headed by Phil Rowe, who will go on to become the most successful breeder of new banana species in history.

1961:
Cuban exiles, sponsored by the CIA, fail in an attempt to depose Fidel Castro. The Bay of Pigs operation is partially funded by United Fruit, which lends its shipping fleet to the invasion force. The banana industry's alleged motivation? Revenge on Castro for nationalizing Cuban plantations following the 1959 revolution.

1961:
Wide-scale adoption of the Cavendish banana begins, requiring huge changes in methods for handling the fruit. The variety, though tasty, is nowhere near as hardy as the Gros Michel, which could simply be cut down by the bunch and tossed into ships' cargo holds. The Cavendish needs to be handled delicately, so methods of boxing and bagging are adopted. This, in turn, leads to further developments, including the opportunity to brand bananas, via the sticker found on every other fruit in each supermarket bunch, and a technological system for tracking bananas from field to market (the use of numeric codes to identify price, origin, harvest, and destination information is the direct ancestor of today's bar codes).

1964:
Standard Fruit changes its name to Dole.

1965:
Ecuador becomes the largest exporter of bananas in the world, supplanting Honduras. (The lead will change hands over the ensuing decades.)

1967:
Chiquita distributes ninety thousand recipe cards detailing an unheard-of creation: the peanut butter and banana sandwich.

1968:
World banana consumption tops 4 billion pounds.

1969:
A banana museum opens in Altadena, California.

1970:
Replacement of the Gros Michel by the Cavendish is complete. The project is so successful, in fact, that it leads to an over-supply of bananas. Prices drop precipitously.

1972:
Black Sigatoka, a disease that rots banana leaves, is first observed. Though it is controllable, treatment efforts require dangerous and costly chemical sprayings or constant moving of banana crops to virgin soil, resulting in the further destruction of rain forest.

1974:
The Securities and Exchange Commission launches an investigation against Chiquita after it learns that the company gave a $1.25 million bribe to the president of Honduras. Chiquita chairman Eli Black leaps out the forty-third story window of New York's Pan Am Building, right above Grand Central Station. The Honduran government is overthrown and Costa Rica threatens to evict United Fruit from its territory.

1975:
Honduras cancels Chiquita's lopsided concession to grow bananas in that country.

1978:
United Fruit pleads guilty to bribery. The scandal that overthrew a government and drove Eli Black to take his own life is resolved for a fine of $14,000.

1980:
Problems begin to emerge with the African banana harvest: Blights and pathogens that should be easily controllable with chemicals begin to show resistance. More and more spraying is needed, at greater and greater cost. Even with all this, production on the continent is cut by half as a result of these stronger diseases.

1981:
Black Sigatoka, the leaf-rotting fungus, hits South America. Once again, the solution favored by banana growers is chemical spraying.

1983:
Chiquita closes its research and development labs, ending an decades-long tradition of study and exploration.

1985:
The Honduran government takes over La Lima and the “Zona Americana,” the abandoned Chiquita compound that served as the company's Central American headquarters. The company swimming pool, movie theater, and horse-racing track are razed, and the facility is converted to the Honduran Agricultural Research Foundation. The primary constant? Phil Rowe, the world's most prolific banana breeder, stays on. In Southern California, another breeder, Doug Richardson, opens Seaside Banana Gardens. The short-lived botanical park and greenhouse facility introduces, for the first time, exotic banana varieties to the U.S. Most Americans still don't know that any banana other than the Cavendish exists.