Bananas, page 14
The company had previously angered the two presidents Roosevelt over its interference in ‘strategic’ matters. In Teddy’s time, in the first decade of the twentieth century, United Fruit stood in the way of his hiring the Jamaican labour he wanted to build the Panama Canal and had to take action to divert the attentions of the president’s anti-trust people. It had sold several companies, in which it had bought a controlling interest, back to the original owners, including Sam ‘Banana Man’ Zemurray. Another company was that owned by some Italian families and which, though only small, had been named Standard Fruit. Thirty years later, the Second World War had diverted President Franklin D. Roosevelt from having his antitrust lawyers act against the company after it had been so keen on trade with Nazi Germany. Now President Eisenhower’s administration had returned to focusing on United Fruit’s activities for fear it was inciting revolution.
Edward Bernays knew precisely what to do and reached for his dog-eared contact list. He made a few calls to old friends who responded with a number of newspaper articles suggesting a coincidence between what Communists had failed to do in Guatemala and what Washington was doing now. In the best style of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the articles implied that Communists remained in deeper recesses of government and were still intent on bringing down such a national institution as United Fruit.
Enthused by its earlier move into film-making with Journey to Banana Land, United Fruit produced another contribution to the genre. This twelve-and-a-half-minute film quickly came to the point that United Fruit was fighting for the West and liberty. The company propaganda department gave much attention to the film and carefully chose its title of Why the Kremlin Hates Bananas. Its title frame showed three bananas arriving like tourists at the walls of the Kremlin, whose cupolas were transformed into the anguished faces of the Soviet Cabinet, or Politburo. It was imaginative and for a while held in high esteem within the company, if not high enough to be released to the outside world. United Fruit itself soon sensed it was embarrassing and eventually, in Kremlin-like mode, would destroy the prints.
The hopes of Bernays and the company had been stymied by Senator McCarthy’s public fall from grace. Ironically, the success of United Fruit in having the Guatemalan government overthrown played its part. Shortly before the coup, McCarthy had accused Allen Dulles’s CIA of being infiltrated by Communists, whereupon the agency had immediately been able to show that any accusations McCarthy had made against it and the Eisenhower administration must have been absurd. The senator trailed away to continue ruining his liver, died three years later and is usually remembered in the US as an isolated moment in history when the country went a little haywire.
In arguing its case against the Department of ‘Injustice’, as the company called it, United Fruit was somewhat restrained by the fact that there were people in high government positions who knew its business as well as the company did. The Dulles brothers had advised it in days when it had been quietly increasing its monopoly hold on Guatemala through control of the railroad. The company continued to dispute the antitrust case for several years but mainly ran up against Washington’s wish to be seen behaving in a different way in Latin America, with Guatemala as an example.
The US plan was both to ditch Arbenz’s land reform and ditch United Fruit’s monopoly. Washington’s rationale appeared to be that Guatemala’s multitude of peasant farmers, contrary to what they certainly believed, didn’t need more land. They needed more capitalism. United Fruit’s Guatemalan assets were, therefore, to be broken up, albeit quite gradually, and distributed among its competitors. Quite a lot of them went to the Standard Fruit Company, United Fruit’s one-time insignificant rival, among others in the international banana trade.
In Costa Rica, United Fruit’s oldest country of operation, its leader Pepe Figueres had other ideas. Figueres had previously decided that the best way to keep his army out of politics was to abolish it and turn its quarters into an art gallery. Next he planned to do some wider remodelling of Costa Rican society. Figueres had been educated at one of the US’s, and Boston’s, finest institutions, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he had a Swedish wife. His plan for Costa Rica reflected a mix of these influences; he proudly pronounced that he was a capitalist and a Social Democrat. Costa Rica needed more schools, hospitals and other demonstrations of a welfare state, he said. It would be extremely rare for Latin America, he added, but fortunately Costa Rica had the means to pay for it. For this, he looked to United Fruit, a loyal friend and an integral member of Costa Rican society for some eighty years. He ordered the company to cough up 60 per cent of its profits.
Figueres got away with it. Hereafter, with its elected government, a European-style welfare system and relatively ordered life on its mesa, the country’s high central plateau, Costa Rica called itself the ‘Switzerland of Central America’. When Figueres devised his scheme, the company was not in a position to oppose it. It had the US Justice Department to fight and anyway, so soon after Guatemala wasn’t the best time for another coup. The US government came to the same conclusion. Vice-president Richard Nixon was sent down to check on this character and his country. Figueres and his wife entertained Nixon and his wife on a United Fruit plantation. The natives around them were apparently happy. A smiling Figueres fed his guests company bananas. Nixon munched his dourly, kept his shirt cuffs buttoned in the humidity and couldn’t quite put his finger on the problem. Then he went away.
Far bigger troubles were emerging. United Fruit’s manipulation of the press during the Guatemalan operation had prompted a reaction among the Fourth Estate. Journalists reflected, didn’t like what had been done to them and resolved ‘never again’. Several went to Cuba to look for Fidel Castro and his forces now ensconced somewhere in the Sierra Maestra in the south-east of the island. One of them, Herbert Matthews, managed to get through to Castro at his camp. Castro kept Matthews confined to the camp, for the journalist’s ‘own safety’ in this dangerous habitat where the troops of President Fulgencio Batista’s government were attempting to hunt Castro down. Castro had his own men roam at distance from the camp, firing randomly to give the impression there were far more of them than there were. In his dispatches, Matthews expressed himself impressed by Castro’s character and resolve. Previous reports, emanating from the Cuban regime and its supporters in the US government, had said that Castro’s forces were nothing more than a few bandits in the hills.
Castro was a son of United Fruit. The company had financed his upbringing and education as well as that of his brother Raúl. Their father was a relatively wealthy Cuban who had leased land from United Fruit and sold the sugar he grew to the company. Fidel Castro spoke some English, was Jesuit-educated and mixed with company people at garden parties and other social occasions. Years later old United Fruit men would reminisce and wonder how it had all gone so wrong. Fidel and Raúl had been such good lads.
Castro walked into Havana and into power on New Year’s Day 1959. The regime of Batista and its support from the US fell away. Castro was acclaimed in the streets and, for a while, also enjoyed favourable US opinion. He gave a major speech at Guantánamo, pointedly near to the US base that had maintained its presence on the island. Castro spoke of Cuba’s past, present and future without exciting great alarm in the US, though some sober mention was made in the press of what he had to say about the United Fruit Company. He had called it a ‘grave social problem’.
United Fruit was involved in a betrayal of its own. It was trying to dump the banana. The fruit was far less profitable than it had been due to disease-related expense. Ever more land clearances and chemical treatments meant bananas cost $2,500 an acre to produce, five times more than they had in the 1930s. Experts in the field spoke of a ‘reversal in banana economics’. Once upon a time, costs had been stable and markets expanding; now markets were static and costs exploding.
Big Mike was exploding too. Pumped full of fertilisers to add weight and profit, it was today more like ‘Fat Mike’. Fertilisers also caused banana plants to grow taller and more vulnerable to hurricanes. ‘Thus acts of God have not been wholly unsolicited,’ wrote one journalistic sceptic. In 1958 a hurricane in Guatemala blew down 80 per cent of the Tiquisate plantation.
United Fruit moved on manfully, seeking to abandon the long-standing partner that had lost its looks. ‘Diversification’ was the new keynote of business and chief executives fancied themselves as Renaissance men, not one-trick dullards. A company producing one item may have been a mark of solidity in the past but modern corporations spread the load, cut the risk and mastered varied portfolios. United Fruit wanted to become a ‘conglomerate’ like others that were so much a part of the scene and venture into profitable fields. It prospected for oil and metals, entirely new experiences for an old plantation company. Clearly cursed with bad luck, it failed to strike it rich.
Its managers claimed that the company’s problem was that it should have diversified earlier. The end of the Second World War would have been the time for a change of plan and for United Fruit to build anew. At that stage, however, so many people had been in thrall to Carmen Miranda, the ‘Good Neighbor’ from the south, with her provocative eyes, dance rhythms and songs that captivated her audience. Miranda did not make a penny out of it and had died aged forty-six in 1955. For her pains, she had been criticised at home for allowing herself and Latin America to be patronised. United Fruit had made millions out of Señorita Chiquita Banana but now found it was too late to adapt.
The company could not offload its old sidekick and tried a familiar reconciliation. It would try to change and remould the banana into something more excitingly diverse. Dessicated banana chips and banana essence for ice cream became the next big items on the agenda and quite failed to spark interest in the marketplace.
United Fruit’s board did not know where to turn next. It was in the hands of some of the best and oldest families of Boston. A Jefferson Coolidge had lately retired as chairman and been succeeded by a Peabody Gardner. No bunch of bananas was better connected. As to the future, what were United Fruit’s plans in the face of disease and such severe disappointments?
Someone asked Al Bump, head honcho during the hard times in Guatemala and now back in Boston as vice-president for tropical operations. An engineer with twenty years in the field, he would know: ‘Grow more bananas,’ said Bump.
‘Something’ had to be done about Cuba, and that something was to be an act of historical infamy. United Fruit’s cane fields there had gone up in flames. Its properties had been seized, its plantation managers beaten and chased away, even murdered. The government of Fidel Castro regarded United Fruit as one of the companies that had represented yanqui imperialism for as long as most people could remember. United Fruit regarded itself as the respectable face of US business on the island.
A whole historic industry disappeared in smoke. The company had its large sugar estates in the north-east of the island around such towns as Preston and Banes. Minor Keith had built a throbbing infrastructure of railway lines serving the plantations. In United Fruit’s heyday, locomotives from the great age of steam had burst from their sheds with broad, bowed cowcatchers up front. They ran through United Fruit’s expansive pastures where thousands of head of cattle grazed. Yet the company had always maintained an aloofness from Cuban life.
Fidel Castro had put things more starkly when, at Guantánamo, he had spoken of United Fruit as a grave social problem. The company grew huge amounts of sugar but neglected to buy very much from the island’s producers. Many were small farmers who could have used the patronage. Castro’s father had been one of the lucky ones. United Fruit had also failed to realise the potential of the business, or if it had, the company had done little about it. The residue of sugar cane was the fibrous mass known as bagasse. One day Brazil would run cars on it and, although no one knew about that yet, bagasse was known to convert quite easily into saleable newsprint and wallboard. Mixed with molasses, bagasse also acted as a binder for cattle food. Molasses was a by-product of sugar and United Fruit had to feed its herds of cattle. It had failed to make the connection, while half a dozen Cuban companies with far more limited resources were building bagasse-processing plants on the island.
Castro and his national bank president, Che Guevara, knew about United Fruit’s penchant for accounting fiddles. The company routinely undervalued its profits, which were just shipped abroad and away. Thomas McCann, formerly of United Fruit’s PR department, in recording his thoughts about life in Cuba noted that the company contrived to have very little money left each year for investment in the island. It was hardly enough ‘to float the Cuban manager’s yacht’.
Fidel Castro may have been a son of the local bourgeoisie but he wasn’t much of a man for yachts. He was a martinet, who had done away with the brothels and the sex shows and the casinos in Cuba run by Meyer Lansky and his generic business friends in ‘the Mob’. United Fruit was not so damaged by this crackdown on the island’s leisure and entertainment sector, since it had stopped its cruises on the Great White Fleet a couple of years before. Other, and specialist, cruise lines proliferated and people were less inclined anymore to travel second-class to a banana. In Cuba, nonetheless, the company estimated its losses as a result of the revolution at $60 million.
The state of the company’s fortunes remained under sympathetic observation by Howard Hunt. The CIA had seen Operation Success work well in Guatemala in 1954 and felt it could be put into action again in Cuba. It would be dusted off for reuse and renamed. ‘Operation Zapata’ struck the right optimistic note. It was audacious enough to announce where the invasion of Cuba was to be, which was the Zapata peninsula in the south-west of the island at the Bay of Pigs.
Hunt’s CIA boss, Allen Dulles, was perfectly happy with the idea. President Eisenhower was far more worried about the prospects for intervention in Cuba. He gave his approval because his field commanders said such action was necessary yet he agonised that it could be ‘our Black Hole of Calcutta’. This was effectively no longer his watch, however, since Ike had nearly served two presidential terms. Vice-president Richard Nixon, on the other hand, dreamed that the chances of his landing the presidency at the 1960 elections would be much assisted by Cuba returning to the fold as Americans went to cast their votes. Conceivably, Nixon imagined one of the Great White Fleet making a triumphant return to Havana harbour with him waving from the rail. Even if that would have been a little too fanciful, United Fruit did make two of its boats available for the imminent Cuban exercise.
In the US, the mission had succeeded before it started. Cubans who had fled the island run by Castro swaggered around Miami with chequebooks and promises of how easy it would soon be to go back and throw him out. They imagined a re-run of the Guatemalan invasion, with the arrival of a ‘liberation force’ of exiles and the crowds cheering in the streets. Castro was a tyrant and he would just have to be toppled for the Cuban people to rise up in joy and relief.
Guatemala was logically chosen as a launch pad but illogically failed to meet expectations. Although the army had accepted United Fruit’s coup of 1954, many junior officers objected to the use of their territory for an attack on another country. Guatemala was being used like a banana republic, they complained. In Nicaragua, the Somoza family remained ever faithful. They put Puerto Cabezas and other areas of the Mosquito Coast at the disposal of the CIA for training and the launching of air strikes.
The planning fell behind and during the US election campaign there was no sign of the operation’s launch. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, taunted Nixon, saying the Republicans talked a big game in the Cold War about Berlin and other remote locations while they did nothing about Castro’s Cuba, which was ninety miles away and nine minutes by jet. Nixon was frustrated because, like many people, he knew of the plan to overthrow Castro but could not talk about what remained an official secret. The delays continued until after the election when Kennedy, not Nixon, was in the White House.
The new president could hardly call off the operation, having himself urged that action be taken. In April 1961, two ships lent by United Fruit’s Great White Fleet were among the seven that sailed to the Bay of Pigs. The boats almost steamed right onto the reefs that no one seemed to have realised were there.
The invasion force of exiled Cubans soon did, as, under fire, they waded across the coral, feet unprotected, boots around their necks, rifles raised above the waves. Those who weren’t shot in the surf were shot on the beaches or captured and laid face down on the sand. Members of Castro’s defence force ran across some of them dragging chainsaws. No towns spontaneously rose in support of the exiles. Some survivors made it back, swimming through the shark-infested waters to the boats off shore. Operation Zapata was an abject failure.
11
Decline and Fall
The Kennedy administration blamed the CIA for the Bay of Pigs debacle and Allen Dulles, its director, resigned for this ‘failure of intelligence’. Those who had lost their assets in Cuba since Fidel Castro’s takeover blamed President John F. Kennedy for not allowing a sufficient number of air strikes to support the invasion. The two sides to the debate evaded the point of whether the invasion should have ever taken place and whether it had been far more characteristic of a bygone world.
