The Myth of Bananaland

The marketing and reality of the United Fruit Company

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When I was a kid and didn’t know much about the world, everything I encountered seemed normal to me. I absorbed and accepted all sorts of culture no matter how strange it was. When I got older, I’d pull out a favorite childhood story for my own kids or encounter a song or story in the wild and realize that a lot of what I enjoyed as a kid made no damn sense.

As a small child, I used to blithely sing about blind mice who had their tails cut off with a carving knife. I read stories about a wolf who, having eaten a little girl’s grandmother, tried to eat her as well. And I thought people were slipping on banana peels all the time.

Have you ever seen anybody slip on a banana peel? I, personally, have not. But if you watch old movies and cartoons, it seems like everybody was sliding around on discarded banana peels. Here are three of the many versions of this trope:

And what’s with “Yes, We Have No Bananas?” — a dumb little song that everybody knew for no apparent reason when I was a kid. The tune, first written in 1923, was such a long-lasting cultural phenomenon that Ed Sullivan invited its writer to sing it more than three decades later:

What was up with early-20th-century people and bananas?

Both of these strange pieces of pop culture date back to a time when bananas were still something of a novelty. The tropical fruit was first introduced into the United States in 1876 at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition after enterprising businessmen realized that they could transport bananas from Central America to the major ports of the East Coast before they ripened.

The banana was novel, and thus had to be marketed to a skeptical public. Marketers had to advertise the banana’s many fine attributes:

NY Academy of Medicine

The banana-related pop culture of the early twentieth century refers to a banana that was dominant back then but is almost impossible to get these days — the Gros Michel banana, a variant that was pretty much wiped out by disease in the 1920s (we eat the Cavendish banana today).

The decline of the Gros Michel is why a Greek fruit salesman told songwriter Frank Silver, in tortured English, that he had no bananas:

Public domain

And perhaps there was an epidemic of banana-peel slipping in the early 20th century — the Gros Michel had a much more slippery skin than today’s dominant banana variant, the Cavendish.

So, yes, there was some fun banana-related pop culture a century ago. But behind the exotic fruit and the silly songs lay a darker reality. Pablo Neruda expressed the problems with the banana industry as well as anybody else:

When the trumpet sounded, it was
all prepared on the earth,
the Jehovah parcelled out the earth
to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company, Inc.
reserved for itself the most succulent,
the central coast of my own land,
the delicate waist of America.
It rechristened its territories
as the ’Banana Republics’
and over the sleeping dead,
over the restless heroes
who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags,
it established the comic opera:
abolished the independencies,
presented crowns of Caesar,
unsheathed envy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tacho flies,
Carias flies, Martines flies,
Ubico flies, damp flies
of modest blood and marmalade,
drunken flies who zoom
over the ordinary graves,
circus flies, wise flies
well trained in tyranny.

Among the blood-thirsty flies
the Fruit Company lands its ships,
taking off the coffee and the fruit;
the treasure of our submerged
territories flow as though
on plates into the ships.

Meanwhile Indians are falling
into the sugared chasms
of the harbours, wrapped
for burials in the mist of the dawn:
a body rolls, a thing
that has no name, a fallen cipher,
a cluster of the dead fruit
thrown down on the dump.

The villain of Neruda’s poem, the United Fruit Company, earned the nickname “El Pulpo” — the octopus — for the way it stifled the countries in which it operated.

United Fruit pitched itself to people in the United States as a delightful purveyor of tasty fruit and a link to the exotic tropics. Meanwhile, its tentacles were encircling more and more of the Americas, slowly strangling society after society.

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The United Fruit Company published a lot of promotional material over the years, but few of its publications convey the image they were trying to portray better than this 1958 map — Welcome to Bananaland!

Rumsey Map Collection

The map combines some interesting tidbits on banana ripeness and cultivation, a pictorial guide to the world of banana harvesting and transportation, a dubious dessert suggestion (I’ll stick with strawberry shortcake, thank you very much), and a quick ethnography of Central America (“Since the 16th Century, the number of people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood had increased until this group is today the most common”). It encapsulates the image that United Fruit was trying to sell to its customers, who could be pleased that they were eating a tasty and healthy fruit while feeling a connection, however slight, to an exotic, tropical part of the world.

United Fruit tried to get Americans interested not just in bananas but in the tropics themselves:

Public domain

The company published books detailing the delights of Central America and the Caribbean. Here’s a typical page from The Golden Caribbean, published in 1900:

Public domain

Why advertise the Caribbean alongside bananas? Well, United Fruit wasn’t just a food company.

United Fruit operated what it called the “Great White Fleet,” a group of fast steamships that it had originally purchased to move bananas as quickly as possible from Central America to the ports of the Eastern United States. But the company soon realized that it could also transport passengers in these ships (painted white to keep the bananas a little cooler), so it built a bustling tourism network. The Great White Fleet was one of the cornerstones of early American tourism to the Caribbean.

By the 1920s, the fleet offered routes all over the Americas and beyond:

Public domain

The company’s materials advertised romance, natural beauty, and warm weather:

Digital Commonwealth

The ships’ menus promised elegant adventures for worldly travelers:

NYPL

NYPL

This photo of a United Fruit steamer docked in Havana makes the whole operation look like a genteel delight:

Public domain

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Most of the tourists who sailed the tropical seas alongside thousands of pounds of bananas never got a real look at the main business of the United Fruit Company. Things weren’t actually very cheerful or placid in Bananaland.

As you might imagine, the United Fruit Company wasn’t eager to document the darker side of its business, so there isn’t much visual evidence of the company’s many abuses. But we do have some reminders of the essentially colonial nature of the company’s operations. This photo of company staff posing in Jamaica echoes many imperialist photos of the era:

Public domain

Many of the company’s photos remind us of the industrial nature of the enterprise. Bananaland wasn’t all tropical breezes and cheerful cultures:

NYPL

Library of Congress

Here girls in St. Lucia load bananas for the company. They were paid a penny a bunch:

Digital Commonwealth

Digital Commonwealth

The photo below is captioned with casual racism: One way of carrying bananas: At the docks of the United Fruit Co., mechanical carriers, so perfected as not to bruise the fruit, have replaced the leisurely negro.

NYPL

The really awful stuff happened off-camera, far away from the eyes of banana-boat tourists and American consumers. United Fruit acquired massive plantations, built itself towns and railroads, and cultivated compliant governments that would not get in the way of the company’s profits. When people resisted the company’s dominance, bad things tended to happen. These abuses were sometimes carried out by the United Fruit Company itself, but, more often, local politicians or the United States itself did the company’s bidding.

The company was involved in many violations of national sovereignty and human rights, but two events stand out.

In 1928, the Colombian military, at United Fruit’s behest, massacred striking workers, killing as many as 1,000 people. The incident became the centerpiece of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Marquez’ fictionalized account captures the cruelty and the chaos of that moment:

Several voices shouted at the same time: "Get down! Get down!”

The people in front had already done so, swept down by the wave of bullets. The survivors, instead of getting down, tried to go back to the small square, and the panic became a dragon's tail as one compact wave ran against another which was moving in the opposite direction, toward the other dragon's tail in the street across the way, where the machine guns were also firing without cease. They were penned in, swirling about in a gigantic whirlwind that little by little was being reduced to its epicenter as the edges were systematically being cut off all around like an onion being peeled by the insatiable and methodical shears of the machine guns. The child saw a woman kneeling with her arms in the shape of a cross in an open space, mysteriously free of the stampede. José Arcadio Segundo put him up there at the moment he fell with his face bathed in blood, before the colossal troop wiped out the empty space, the kneeling woman, the light of the high, drought-stricken sky, and the whorish world where Úrsula Iguarán had sold so many little candy animals.

And in 1954, the CIA protected United Fruit’s interests by overthrowing the Guatemalan government, which had threatened to take some of the company’s land — much of which was being held in reserve, not even cultivated — and redistribute it. The American ambassador to the country used the Cold War to justify the ousting of President Jacobo Arbenz even though Arbenz was not quite a communist. The ambassador, John Peurifoy, famously said that "if Arbenz is not a communist, he will certainly do until one comes along." 

Dwight Eisenhower tried to put a good face on things by explaining that

The people of Guatemala, in a magnificent effort, have liberated themselves from the shackles of international Communist direction and reclaimed their right for self-determination . . . I pay tribute to the historic demonstration of devotion to the cause of freedom given by the people of Guatemala and their leaders.

But it was clear what had really happened. The American-led coup installed a dictator, Carlos Castillo Armas, who repealed the constitution, established concentration camps for his enemies, and arrested thousands of dissidents. After his assassination in 1957, the country was plunged into a terrible civil war.

As I said, there aren’t many photos of these events, and I try to make these Sunday posts as visual as possible. So we’ll have to do with art. In 1954, the year of the Guatemalan coup, Diego Rivera painted Glorious Victory:

TortugaHalo, CC 4.0

The painting shows John Dulles, the Secretary of State, shaking hands with Castillo Armas while Ambassador Peurifoy and a Catholic priest look on. Many of the figures have American currency poking out of their pockets or in their hands. To the right of the politicians is the death and destruction of a revolution. To the left is the source of this whole mess — United Fruit, whose workers are loading bananas onto one of the great white ships under the watchful eye of a soldier.

This, it turned out, was a much truer representation of “Bananaland” than the United Fruit Company’s marketing.

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