Bananaland
How to cover up exploitation and suffering
This public relations map offers a breezy and informative guide to United Fruit’s banana business in Central America. The map paints a picture of a global company partnering with locals to raise and export bananas.
The map masks a brutal history of exploiting native peoples and African slaves. An inset center left states:
Reality: Negroes didn’t “come” to the Americas - they were kidnapped from Africa and enslaved.
The brutal extractive realities of economic imperialism is described in these egalitarian terms in inset at lower right:
Reality: United Fruit created an exploitive economy, developing infrastructure designed to extract bananas for export. The “prosperous farmers” were in fact wealthy landowners exploiting the labor of their impoverished countrymen. Only a few rich locals had access to American exports in exchange for collaborating with United Fruit.
The United Fruit Company was an American multinational corporation that traded in tropical fruit (primarily bananas) grown on Latin American plantations and sold in the United States and Europe. It flourished in the early and mid-20th century, and it came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean coast of Colombia and the West Indies. Although it competed with the Standard Fruit Company (later Dole Food Company) for dominance in the international banana trade, it maintained a virtual monopoly in certain regions, some of which came to be called banana republics – such as Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Beginning in 1952, United Fruit intensively lobbied the U.S. government to intervene in Guatemala while mounting a misinformation campaign to portray the Guatemalan government as communist. In 1954, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency deposed the government of Guatemala, elected in 1950, elected in and installed a pro-business military dictatorship.
Ironically, about the time of this map, Fidel Castro was winning his guerrilla war in Cuba against the corrupt American puppet regime of Fulgencio Batista.
The destructive influence of United Fruit was described this way by Pablo Neruda in "La United Fruit Co." (1950):
The Fruit Company, Inc. reserved for itself the most succulent piece, the central coast of my own land, the delicate waist of America. It rechristened its territories '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: it abolished free will, gave out imperial crowns, encouraged envy, attracted the dictatorship of flies ... flies sticky with submissive blood and marmalade, drunken flies that buzz over the tombs of the people, circus flies, wise flies expert at tyranny.
Publication date: 1958
Publisher: United Fruit Company, U.S.
Credit: David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.
Nothing funny to say about this one. It is a grim reminder we all need to be aware of where are food comes from. And everything else for that matter.