Harsh Times, page 1
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TO THREE FRIENDS:
Soledad Álvarez,
Tony Raful, and
Bernardo Vega
Harsh times they were!
—SAINT TERESA OF ÁVILA
I’d never heard of this bloody place Guatemala until I was in my seventy-ninth year.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
BEFORE
THOUGH THEY ARE UNKNOWN to the broader public, and occupy a minor place in the history books, the people with the greatest influence over the destiny of Guatemala and, in a way, over the entirety of Central America in the twentieth century, were Edward L. Bernays and Sam Zemurray, two men who could not be more dissimilar from one another in terms of origins, temperament, and vocation.
Zemurray was born in 1877, not far from the Black Sea, and being a Jew in a time of vicious pogroms across Russian Territory, he fled to the United States, where he arrived along with one of his aunts at fifteen years of age. They took refuge in the home of a relative in Selma, Alabama. Edward L. Bernays was also from a family of Jewish immigrants, but they were wealthy, from the upper class, and boasted an illustrious figure among their numbers: Bernays’s uncle, Sigmund Freud. Putting aside their Judaism—and neither was particularly devout—the two of them were quite different. Edward L. Bernays styled himself a sort of father of public relations, and if he didn’t invent the profession, he did take it (at Guatemala’s expense) to unanticipated heights, making it the central political, social, and economic weapon of the twentieth century. This much there was no denying, even if his egoism compelled him to pathological degrees of exaggeration. They met for the first time in 1948, and began working together that same year. Sam Zemurray asked for an appointment, and Bernays received him in his small office in the heart of Manhattan. Most likely, the enormous and badly dressed brute, with his five-o’-clock shadow, open collar, faded blazer, and work boots made a poor impression on Bernays, known for elegant suits, scrupulous diction, Yardley cologne, and aristocratic manners.
“I tried to read your book Propaganda, but I didn’t get much out of it,” Zemurray told the publicist by way of introduction. He spoke a labored English, as though hesitating over every word.
“But the writing is quite plain, any literate person can grasp it,” Bernays objected.
“Could be it’s my fault,” the other man admitted, not discomfited in the least. “Truth is, I’m not much of a reader. I hardly went to school back in Russia and I never completely got English, as you can tell. It’s even worse when I write letters, they come out filled with misspellings. I’m more interested in action than the life of the mind.”
“Well, if that’s the case, I’m not sure what I can do for you, Mr. Zemurray,” Bernays said, making as if to stand up.
“I won’t waste much of your time,” the other interjected. “I’m head of a company that brings bananas from Central America to the United States.”
“United Fruit?” Bernays asked, examining his shabby visitor with greater curiosity than before.
“Seems we have a bad reputation in the United States and Central America. In the countries where we operate, in other words,” Zemurray continued with a shrug. “And word is, you’re the man who can fix that. I’m here to hire you as the company’s director of public relations. Or something along those lines, you feel free to choose the title. And the salary as well, to save us time.”
Such were the beginnings of the relationship between two men who were poles apart, a refined publicist and aspiring academic and intellectual and the boorish self-made impresario Sam Zemurray, who had started out with savings of one hundred fifty dollars and had built a company that made him a millionaire, despite his appearance. He hadn’t invented the banana, of course, but it was thanks to him that in the United States, where few people had tried that exotic fruit, it now formed part of millions of Americans’ diet and was beginning to make inroads into Europe and other parts of the world. How had he managed it? It is hard to say objectively, because in Sam Zemurray’s life, fact and legend mingle. This brash entrepreneur seemed less the product of the American business world than of the pages of an adventure story. And unlike Bernays, he wasn’t at all ostentatious, and rarely spoke about his life.
In the course of his journeys, Zemurray had discovered the banana tree in the forests of Central America, and with a fortuitous instinct about the commercial potential of its fruit, he began transporting it in motorboats to New Orleans and other North American cities. It was successful from the beginning. So much so that growing demand turned him from a mere vendor into a cultivator and international banana producer. This was the beginning of United Fruit, a company which, by the beginning of the 1950s, extended its reach into Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Colombia, and a number of Caribbean islands, generating more dollars than the vast majority of firms in the United States or in the rest of the world. The empire was unquestionably the work of a single man: Sam Zemurray. And now many hundreds of people depended on him.
To achieve all this, he had worked from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, traveling throughout Central America and the Caribbean in dire conditions, wrangling over terrain at gun- or knife-point with other speculators like himself, sleeping hundreds of nights in open fields, devoured by mosquitoes, waylaid more than once by the ravages of swamp fever, bribing authorities and hoodwinking peasants and ignorant natives, doing deals with corrupt dictators whose greed or stupidity had gradually enabled him to acquire properties whose area in hectares now exceeded that of a respectably sized European country, creating thousands of jobs, laying down railroads, opening ports and connecting barbarism with civilization. At least, this was what Sam Zemurray said when forced to defend himself from the attacks leveled at United Fruit—La Frutera, which people all over Central America had christened the Octopus—attacks brought not just by the envious, but by his own North American competitors, rivals he’d never given a fair shake in a region where he exercised a tyrannical monopoly in the production and commercialization of the banana. His triumph was based, in the example of Guatemala, on absolute control of the country’s sole port to the Caribbean—Puerto Barrios—as well as of the electrical systems and the railway that spanned the coasts of two oceans, which belonged exclusively to his company.
They were complete opposites, but they made a good team. Bernays helped a great deal to improve the company’s image in the United States, to make it presentable to the upper echelon of Washington politics, to build ties between it and the self-styled aristocrat millionaires of Boston. He had come to publicity indirectly, thanks to his good relations with a wide range of persons, especially diplomats, politicians, newspaper and radio and television station owners, businessmen, and high-level bankers. He was an intelligent, hardworking, likable man, and one of his first achievements was organizing a U.S. tour for Enrico Caruso, the celebrated Italian singer. Bernays’s open and refined manner, his culture, his accessible demeanor pleased people, and he gave the impression of being more important and influential than he was. Naturally, advertising and public relations had existed before his birth, but Bernays had raised the profession, which every company depended on but disdained, into a sophisticated intellectual discipline, an extension of sociology, economics, and politics. He gave lectures and classes at prestigious universities, published articles and books, presented his occupation as the most representative pursuit of the twentieth century, synonymous with modernity and progress. In Propaganda (1928), he had written a prophetic paragraph, which would, in a certain way, pass on to posterity: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country … it is the intelligent minorities which need to make use of propaganda continuously and systematically.” Bernays would apply this thesis, which certain critics considered the very negation of democracy itself, with great effectiveness in Guatemala a decade after beginning work as public relations consultant for United Fruit.
His advice did much to clean up the company’s image and garner it support and influence in the political world. The Octopus had never bothered to present its considerable industrial and commercial activities as something beneficial to society in general, let alone the “savage countries” where it operated and which—according to Bernays—it was helping to emerge from barbarism, creating jobs for thousands of citizens, raising their standard of living, and in this way bringing them into the fold of modernity, progress, the twentieth century, civilization. Bernays convinced Zemurray that the company should build schools in its dominions, take Catholic priests and Protestant preachers onto the plantations, set up first-aid centers and other projects of that ilk, give scholarships and travel grants to students and teachers, and he would publicize all this as incontrovertible evidence of the modernizing influence they were exerting. At the same time, through rigorous planning and the help of scientists and technicians, he promoted the consumption of the banana at breakfast and all ho
Bernays also extended and deepened United Fruit’s political influence in Boston. The richest of the rich in that New England city where the company began had more than money and power; they had prejudices, specifically against Jews like Zemurray, who had won control of the company from the Brahmins, and so it was no mean feat to get Henry Cabot Lodge to accept a post on the board of United Fruit, or for John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen from the white-shoe legal firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York to agree to work with the company. But Bernays knew that money opens doors and that not even racial prejudice can resist it, and he managed to cement these strained ties after the so-called October Revolution of 1944 in Guatemala, when United Fruit started to sense danger in the wings. Bernays’s ideas and relationships would be extremely useful in toppling the alleged “communist government” in Guatemala and replacing it with a more democratic one—that is, a more docile one, more congenial to their interests.
Alarms began going off during the mandate of Juan José Arévalo (1945–1950). Not because Professor Arévalo, defender of the muddled ideal of “spiritual socialism,” had taken action against United Fruit. But he did oversee the passage of a labor law that allowed workers and peasants to form unions, and this had never been permitted in the company’s domains up to that time. Zemurray and the other directors caught wind of it. In a heated meeting of the board in Boston, it was agreed that Bernays would visit Guatemala, assess the situation and future prospects, and get a sense of how dangerous events there could be under the first government in the history of the country to emerge from truly free elections.
Bernays spent two weeks in Guatemala, staying at the Hotel Panamerican in the center of the city, not far from the National Palace. As he didn’t speak Spanish, he relied on translators to interview landowners, soldiers, bankers, members of congress, policemen, foreigners who had long resided in the country, union leaders, journalists, and employees of the United States Embassy and of United Fruit. He did his job well, despite suffering from the heat and the mosquitoes.
At another meeting of the board in Boston, he offered personal reflections on what, in his judgment, was taking place in Guatemala. He relied on notes for his presentation, and spoke with the ease of a good professional and without an ounce of cynicism:
“The danger that Guatemala should turn communist and become a beachhead for a Soviet infiltration of Central America that would pose a threat to the Panama Canal is remote and for the moment, I would say, inexistent,” he assured them. “Few people in Guatemala know what Marxism or communism are, even among the stray elements calling themselves communists who founded the Escuela Claridad to disseminate revolutionary ideas. The danger isn’t real, but it is convenient for us that people believe it exists, above all in the United States. The real danger is another one. I have spoken with President Arévalo and his closest advisers in person. He is as anticommunist as you and I. Proof is that the president and his supporters have insisted that the new Constitution of Guatemala forbid the existence of political parties with international connections. They’ve declared on numerous occasions that ‘communism is the greatest threat faced by democracy,’ and they closed down the aforementioned Escuela Claridad and deported its founders. And yet, contradictory as it may seem to you, Arévalo’s boundless love for democracy represents a serious threat for United Fruit. This, gentlemen, is something good for you to know, but not to say aloud.”
He smiled and looked theatrically at all the members of the board, some of whom smiled back politely. Then, after a brief pause, he continued:
“Arévalo would like to make Guatemala a democracy like the United States, a country he admires and considers a model. Dreamers are dangerous, and it is in this sense that Dr. Arévalo is dangerous. His project has not the least chance of being realized. How can you turn a country of three million inhabitants, most of them illiterate Indians who have just emerged from paganism or are still in the grips of it, where there must be three or four shamans for every doctor—how can you turn such a place into a modern democracy? A place where, moreover, a white minority made up of racist landowners and speculators detests the Indians and treats them like slaves. The military men I’ve spoken to seem to be living in the nineteenth century as well, and could stage a coup at any moment. President Arévalo has suffered a number of military rebellions already, but he’s managed to quash them. Now then. Though his efforts to make his country into a modern democracy strike me as vain, let’s not deceive ourselves: any advancement he makes in this direction will be highly detrimental to us.
“You realize that, don’t you?” he went on, after another pause to take a few sips of water. “Let me give you a few examples. Arévalo has approved a labor law that permits the formation of unions in businesses and farms and allows workers and peasants to join. And he has drafted an antimonopoly law based on already existing legislation in the United States. You can imagine what a measure to ensure equal competition would mean for United Fruit: if it didn’t ruin us completely, at the least we’d be looking at a major decline in revenues. Our profits are not just the result of our hard work, our commitment, the money we spend to prevent diseases, or the forest we clear to plant more banana trees. They also come from our monopoly, which keeps competitors away from our territories, and the privileged conditions we work under, with no taxes, no unions, none of the risks and dangers those things imply. The problem isn’t just Guatemala, which is a small part of the world we operate in. It is the contagion spreading to other countries in Central America and to Colombia if this idea of becoming a ‘modern democracy’ were to catch on there. United Fruit would be forced to deal with unions and international competition, to pay taxes, to guarantee health insurance and offer retirement plans for workers and their families, and it would be subject to the hatred and envy prosperous, well-run companies inevitably arouse in poor countries—especially if they’re American. The danger, gentlemen, lies in setting a bad example. Not so much communism as democracy in Guatemala. Though it will likely never materialize, any achievements in this direction will mean a loss and a step backward for us.”
He stopped speaking and examined the perturbed or inquisitive faces of the board members. Sam Zemurray, the only one not wearing a tie, looking out of place among the elegant gentlemen seated together at the long table, said:
“Fine, you’ve given us the diagnosis. Now how do we cure the disease?”
“I wanted to let you catch your breath before continuing,” Bernays joked, taking another sip of water. “Now I will discuss the remedies, Sam. It will be a long, complicated, costly process. But it will kill the infection at the root. And that could mean another fifty years of expansion, profitability, tranquility for United Fruit.”
Edward L. Bernays knew what he was talking about. The treatment meant working simultaneously on the United States government and North American public opinion. Neither of them had the least idea that Guatemala existed, let alone that it constituted a problem. That was, in principle, a good thing. “We are the ones who have to enlighten the government and public opinion about Guatemala, and to do it in such a way as to convince them the problem is so serious, so grave, that it must be taken care of immediately. How? With subtlety and good timing. Organizing things so that public opinion, which is essential in a democracy, pressures the government to act in order to head off a serious threat. What threat? The very same one I have just told you Guatemala doesn’t represent: the Soviet Trojan horse sneaking through the U.S.A.’s back door. How do we convince the public that Guatemala is a country in which communism is already a reality, one that will soon become the first satellite of the Soviet Union in the new world if Washington fails to act? With the press, radio, and television, the main resources that inform and orient the citizenry, in free countries as well as enslaved ones. We must open the eyes of the press to the danger looming just two hours by plane from the United States, right on the doorstep of the Panama Canal.
