Banana (9 page)

I
T WASN'T THAT UNITED FRUIT
was ignorant of Panama disease. A few executives warned of an impending disaster, but since the disease was relatively slow-moving, compared to today's banana maladies, they generally went unheeded.

The banana barons might have adopted a resistant banana if they knew of one exactly like the Gros Michel, requiring no change in consumer tastes or in growing, ripening, and shipping. While the Cavendish was grown as a minor commercial variety in a few places, the idea that it would replace the best-known banana was unthinkable. The lesser-known fruit was smaller, more fragile, and didn't taste as good as the Gros Michel. Though the banana industry had shown, repeatedly, that it knew how to innovate, it no longer seemed to want to—not when it could simply level some virgin forest and start new plantations to replace the dying ones.

The first efforts to breed stronger bananas were conducted by academics, who had a daunting task: they had to, for the first time, find out what bananas actually were, and they had to determine the genetic makeup of the fruit at a time when such structural studies were barely heard of. Almost nothing was known about bananas. With just a single variety, and it so easy to grow, an advanced understanding of the fruit, until then, seemed pointless.

The Gros Michel crisis made the work seem absolutely urgent—at least to the scientists tracking the path of the disease. In 1922 the British government founded the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, with solving the Panama disease riddle as the institution's primary task. The key to finding a solution, the early banana scientists believed, was in creating hybrid fruit, crossing the Gros Michel with some kind of wild banana, hoping that the resistant qualities of the latter would combine with, but not significantly alter, the taste and shipping characteristics of the former. A botanical research station in Trinidad was opened so that whatever resulted from the college's experiments could be tested in the field. Much of this work was independent, though some was commissioned by United Fruit. Scientists frequently moved between the public institutions and the private employer.

The results were maddening. E. E. Cheesman, who directed the facility, described the frustrating nature of the search for a new banana in a 1931 report: “The existence together in Gros Michel of many characters desirable in a commercial banana, such as compactness of bunch, a fruit skin not abnormally sensitive to bruising, ability to stand up well to conditions of bulk transport, and an attractive appearance on ripening, would appear at first to render the problem a simple one. All that is immediately required is to ‘build in' to this type resistance to Panama Disease.”

Noting that there were several other banana breeds that had that resistance, he concluded that “in many crops, the solution would be a comparatively elementary exercise in plant breeding.”

Not with sexless, sterile bananas.

Unlike the Cavendish, seeds could occasionally appear in the Gros Michel—one or two for every ten thousand plants. Finding one meant manually examining each individual fruit. Even if a seed was discovered and bred, the odds of it actually growing into something were slim. If growth did occur, the problem reversed itself: the new bananas would often have seeds, making them unacceptable as an edible product. “To start with a plant almost completely sexually sterile, raise progeny in sufficient numbers to make a breeding problem possible, combine desirable characters and end with another sterile plant, is very nearly unique in plant breeding,” Cheesman noted.

A worldwide search for wild bananas—blind-date candidates for marriage with Gros Michel—began. Scientists and explorers searched Africa, Asia, and the Americas for wild species; these were then transported back to Trinidad and Jamaica, where they were stored and tested. Many of the collected bananas, along with the processes they started, form the basis for today's banana-breeding experiments.

In 1925 a wave of excitement swept through the small world of banana research. A hybrid emerged, growing to full fruit, which seemed to have the desired characteristics. Most importantly, the plant, unlike every other hybrid the Imperial College produced, was resistant to Panama disease. The new fruit was significant enough that researchers felt they could give it a name. IC1 was the first hybrid banana to come from the Imperial College; the naming convention—an abbreviation for the breeding facility, followed by a sequenced number—is still used in banana research today.

But subsequent generations of IC1 turned out to be less perfect. Each time a new crop was harvested, the fruit moved further and further from the ideal. The hybrid's status was downgraded from candidate to raw material for future experimentation. Those successor bananas were equally inconsistent. Fruit that bred well in the lab failed in the field. Many even contracted Panama disease.

Humans had been breeding bananas for millennia, with spectacular success across the globe. But they'd never tried to create a fruit that was meant to be grown by the billions and feed people thousands of miles away. For years the effort was a dismal failure. Yet a world search for new bananas had begun. The fruit was better understood. And scientists, from then on, would grow more and more savvy about breeding bananas.

I
REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME
I ever understood that the retelling of ordinary events could become magic. I was a teenager, just beginning to write, searching for inspiration. I'd always loved books about other worlds—science fiction, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan series, even old pulp novels I bought at a local junk shop. But it had only recently begun to occur to me that the greatest constructed worlds could be found in works that were considered to be “true” literature.

That point was made most sharply with Gabriel García Márquez's
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. I spent half a summer reading it, staying up late to follow the epic story that chronicled six generations of a single family living in a fictional village in Colombia. I was so enthralled by the characters, by the way they were swept up in events that seemed to be not of this world, that I hardly noticed the more earthbound events that actually formed the novel's story.

The book plays out against a backdrop of bananas. The climax comes during a plantation strike, when martial law is declared. The workers gather in their town square amidst ominous signs. “Around twelve o'clock,” Márquez writes, “more than three thousand people, workers, women, and children, had spilled out into the open space in front of the station and were pressing into the neighboring streets, which the army had closed off with rows of machine guns.” The crowd remains in the square, even after they are ordered to disperse. A second warning is met with defiance. Eventually, time runs out: “Fourteen machine guns answered at once. But it all seemed like a farce. It was as if the machine guns had been loaded with caps, because their panting rattle could be heard and their incandescent spitting could be seen, but not the slightest reaction was perceived, not a cry, not even a sigh among the compact crowd that seemed petrified by an instantaneous vulnerability. Suddenly, on one side of the station, a cry of death tore open the enchantment: ‘Aaaagh, Mother.' A seismic voice, a volcanic breath, the road of a cataclysm broke out in the center of the crowd.” Three thousand striking banana workers are killed; their bodies, one by one, are thrown into the ocean.

In rereading the book a few months ago, I was once again moved not just by the author's language but by the way it created, in just a few words, both a sense of sorrow and a photographic depiction of the events surrounding it.

But what I also understood, after spending several years researching the book you're reading now, was that this wasn't fiction. Márquez had woven a story, for sure, but the event he was talking about—the Colombia banana massacre of 1929—was real.

WITHOUT A NEW BANANA
,
a vicious cycle emerged: Fruit was grown then stricken; plantations were abandoned and new ones founded; disease would strike again. Unlike the apple industry, banana growers couldn't afford to market multiple varieties of their fruit. If the uniformity of bananas was what made them so powerful and popular, it also brought about the emergence of the first monoculture—dependence on a single variety of crop, creating huge economies of scale and huge susceptibility to catastrophe—in the history of commercial agriculture. The system worked when Keith was building railroads and when it took just a few hoodlums and good timing to take over a country. But by the late 1920s, as the banana industry became larger, people in the countries where the fruit grew became more aware of just how valuable the product they were providing to American consumers was—and how little of that value they were receiving. They were underpaid and treated poorly. To add insult to injury, their land was being stolen. At the same time, a powerful wave of workers' movements—inspired by the founding of the Soviet Union in 1917—was reaching Latin America.

The banana industry—rightly—saw this as a huge threat. It couldn't survive without cheap fruit, which meant cheap labor. Because Panama disease was permanently making fallow so much of its existing holdings, the fruit companies had a continuous need for new land, according to John Soluri, author of
Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States
. To keep bananas affordable, that territory needed to be acquired, and cultivated, as inexpensively as possible. Controlling labor and terrain couldn't be done without cooperative governments (or military intervention, if they weren't). But Latin American leaders also had to pay some attention to their constituents. Sometimes, the general public would be appeased; other times it was repressed. In either case, the banana industry had to work constantly to stay ahead and in control of an ever-deepening cycle of exploitation, violence, and revolution.

But even in a region that had seen dozens of interventions and takeovers, what happened in Colombia, beginning in December 1928 and climaxing just after the start of the new year, was exceptional.

United Fruit had been in Colombia since 1899, operating plantations in the Magdalena region of the country. Colombia was different from the other United Fruit nations. With large exports of coffee, it was not exclusively a banana land. Intense political conflict had been part of Colombia's history long before the fruit was planted there: At the turn of the century, conservatives and liberals had fought the brutal War of a Thousand Days, which cost as many as 100,000 lives. The hostilities had also cost the country Panama—which had been a territory of Colombia—and brought a conservative and ultimately banana-friendly government to power.

But the sweetheart deals banana companies received on land, taxation, and worker conditions had a backlash. The plantation operators became a target for liberal and social activists. By the early 1920s, Colombian workers began feeling confident enough to strike. Even some local growers attempted to loosen the American produce giant's grip on the nation by opening their own independent export operations (they were defeated by generous “grants” United Fruit gave to plantation operators who remained in the fold).

By 1927 Colombia's political system seemed to be leaning against the banana conglomerate. The national assembly ordered an investigation into United Fruit's land-acquisition policies. The conservative party's thirty-year grip on power seemed to be loosening, with liberals making gains, especially in the countryside. Banana workers, who were without even the most basic rights, felt emboldened.

The biggest labor action ever faced by a banana company began in October 1928, when 32,000 workers went on strike. They demanded to be granted medical treatment and proper toilet facilities; they insisted on being paid in cash rather than company-issued scrip only redeemable in United Fruit–owned stores. They asked that they be considered true employees rather than subcontractors who weren't even afforded the minimal protection of Colombia's weakly drawn labor laws.

The strike panicked United Fruit. Even after the government sent troops to occupy Magdalena, effectively usurping liberal power, the nation was too volatile for anything to be guaranteed.

The conflict made headlines in the United States. A
New York Times
article, published in December 1928, laid out the company position on the strike. Eight decades later, and in light of what happened next, United Fruit's statements seem beyond cruel. Banana company spokesmen attributed the strike not to a genuine need to improve conditions for exploited workers but to a “subversive movement” and “not representatives of any established body of laborers.” In fact, the article quoted the company as saying, “no complaints have been received by our employees.”

United Fruit reported that in response to the strike, the Colombian government had suspended the rights of free assembly and free speech. “We are convinced,” a spokesperson said, “that only this prompt action by the government prevented great loss of life.” The clampdown was also celebrated by the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Jefferson Caffery. In a telegram sent to U.S. Secretary of State Frank Billings Kellogg, he wrote: “I have been following the…strike through United Fruit Company representative here; also through minister of Foreign Affairs who on Saturday told me government would send additional troops and would arrest all strike leaders and transport them to prison at Cartagena; that government would give adequate protection to American interests involved.”

Martial law was declared on December 5.

On December 6, in the town of Ciénaga—just as in Márquez's fictional Macondo—banana workers gathered in the town square. The city hall stood at one end and the main church at the other. The workers were not there, specifically, to protest. December 6 was a Sunday; they'd attended mass and were waiting to hear a speech by the regional governor. Because the address would follow church services, the workers were accompanied by their wives and families.

General Cortés Vargas—the military official in charge of the region, who claimed he acted only to prevent an even worse intervention by the U.S. military—had given his commanders these orders: “Prepare your mind to face the crowds of rebels…and kill before foreign troops tread upon our soil.”

Four machine gun positions surrounded the square, on rooftops, one at each corner.

An order was given. The area was to be cleared in five minutes. The countdown had begun. The crowd didn't—and couldn't, packed into the square as they were—disperse. The troops opened fire.

As he had throughout the early stages of the crisis, U.S. ambassador Caffery reported the events to his superiors in Washington. The tone and language of the memo are beyond chilling. They are as clear a manifestation of terrible indifference as you will ever read: “I have the honor to report,” Caffery wrote, “that the Bogotá representative of the United Fruit Company told me yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military exceeded one thousand.”