Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE TROUBLED LEGACY OF BANANAS
The banana. Nothing embodies the tumultuous history of Latin America - and its com-
plicated relationship with the United States - quite like this common yellow fruit. It is the
crop that has determined the path of current affairs in more than one Central American
nation. It is the sobriquet used to describe corrupt, dictatorial regimes - 'the banana re-
public.' Bananas are a symbol of frivolity, the raw material for Carmen Miranda hats and
Busby Berkeley dance numbers. (Want to blow your mind? Look up 'The Lady with the
Tutti Frutti Hat' from the 1942 musical flickThe Gang's All Here- it's a hallucinogenic
panorama of dancing bananas.)
It was in Costa Rica, interestingly, where the idea of bananas as an industry was born.
Imported from the Canary Islands by sailors during the colonial period, the fruit had long
been a basic foodstuff in the Caribbean islands. But it was 19th-century railroad baron
Minor Keith who turned it into a booming international business. After building the rail-
road between San José and Limón, Keith proceeded to carpet vast swaths of Central
America in bananas. Over the course of the 20th century, the company he founded - Un-
ited Fruit - would become an integral part of the region's economies and a behind-the-
scenes puppet master in its political systems. (For a highly readable history on this topic,
pick upBananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World,by journalist Peter
Chapman.)
Part of the reason bananas became a continent-wide crop boils down to profit and bio-
logy. Bananas - a fruit afflicted with a high rate of spoilage - require a vast economy of
scale (and cheap labor) to be profitable. It's also an inordinately delicate fruit to cultivate,
partly because bananas are clones. The fruit doesn't grow from seeds; its propagation re-
quires that a cutting be taken from an existing plant and put into the ground. This makes
them incredibly vulnerable to illness - what kills one banana kills all bananas. Entire net-
works of plantations can be devastated by fungus, such as the diseases that swept
through Costa Rica's southern Caribbean coast in the 1910s and '20s.
Over the years, this weakness has led growers to turn to a veritable arsenal of chemic-
als to protect their crops. This, in turn, has taken a toll on both the environment and the
workers who spray them, some of whom have been rendered sterile by powerful fungi-
cides such as DBCP (now banned). Groups of workers in various countries have filed nu-
merous lawsuits against fruit companies and chemical manufacturers - and won - but
these victories are generally short-lived. Even when Central American courts rule in work-
ers' favor, it is practically impossible for plaintiffs to secure payouts.
