(upbeat music)
♪ I'm Chiquita banana and I'm here to say ♪
- [Narrator] This is the story of a fruit, a simple fruit,
available all year round all around the world.
It's the story of a fruit on which an empire was built,
one of the first modern multinationals,
the United Fruit Company.
♪ I get the blues in the morning ♪
♪ I get the blues in the night ♪
♪ But when I eat a banana sundae ♪
♪ Mmm, it's just right ♪
This is the story of a fruit which altered the destiny
of Central America and gave its name to republics.
- It became notorious.
It became the symbol of all that's wrong
with American capitalism.
- [Narrator] This is an economic and political tale,
a little story about globalization.
This is the story of a fruit, a simple fruit, the banana.
(upbeat music)
It all began in 1871, when the government in Costa Rica
asked a certain Minor Cooper Keith from New York
to construct a railway.
It was to link the Caribbean coast
to the high plateaus through the jungle.
(explosion blares)
But nothing went as planned.
The jungle was pitiless, accidents, scorpions, malaria.
4,000 men died for just 40 kilometers of railway.
And when a stock market crash dragged the world economy
into a depression, credit disappeared.
Costa Rica could no longer pay.
The railway remained unfinished.
Minor was ruined.
He did not yet know that fortune was in fact
right there at his feet, in the humid soil of the jungle,
in these unpretentious rhizomes
which he had planted to feed his workers,
in this fruit, this simple fruit of the tropics, the banana.
The simple food of Costa Rican workers,
the banana appeared at the turn of the century
in northern markets in the United States.
It was a prized delicacy,
expensive because it was rare and perishable.
Whoever managed to transport it quickly enough
before it could ripen and rot could turn it into gold,
and Minor recognized that.
Very soon, he was exporting bananas.
They saved him from ruin.
He struck an agreement with Costa Rica.
He would finish work on the railway.
In return, he asked for just two things,
the right to operate the line for his own profit,
and land, lots of it,
land for producing bananas,
trains for transporting them quickly and cheaply.
This was the start of his fortune.
In 1899, Minor joined forces with two Boston wholesalers.
He put in his plantations and his Central American railways.
His associates provided a fleet of ships
and a distribution network across the United States.
On the 30th of March 1899,
together, they founded the United Fruit Company.
- My working definition of a multinational is a company
which owns and controls assets in more than one country.
I would say it's among the first of the multinationals
in this kind of like primary commodity type of business.
And it's really taking the process of vertical integration
to quite an extreme extent, including constructing
what's gonna become one of the biggest shipping fleets
actually in the world and integrating right down
through to distribution in the United States.
So it's really quite, quite extreme at this time.
But they're pioneering in a more fundamental way
because this company is actually creating the market
for bananas as well as pioneering how to deliver
the product to their consumer.
So in 1890, nobody in the United States
really knew what a banana was basically.
By 1914, you can buy bananas
in virtually all big American towns.
- [Narrator] Delicious, nourishing, full of vitamins.
The United Fruit Company had a flare for promoting bananas.
Mothers of families were the target.
They published recipes, solicited pediatricians
who sang their praises.
- Ah.
- [Narrator] Very soon, Americans could no longer
do without them.
(upbeat piano music)
Imported by the ton, reasonably priced,
they were accessible to everyone.
♪ We have no bananas ♪
Bananas were fragile.
Tempests, flooding, and heatwaves
regularly devastated the plantations.
Bananas could become scarce.
♪ But yes, we have no bananas ♪
♪ We have no bananas today ♪
For Minor and his associates, it was obvious.
They needed to produce more, ever more bananas
over a much larger area right across Central America.
- [Male Narrator] Today's fast white steamship
travels across the Caribbean with cargoes
more valuable than pirate's gold.
And officers in trim white uniforms pick up
their golden cargoes from a place we call Banana Land.
- [Narrator] Banana Land,
this was the Central American nations.
Former Spanish colonies, they had won their independence
at the beginning of the 19th century.
But the United States regarded them as its private
hunting ground, a natural extension of their market.
For the United Fruit Company, this was one single territory
completely given over to the production of bananas.
The United Fruit Company kept on growing.
It needed ever more land.
In Panama and Costa Rica, Indian farmers
who had no property rights were evicted.
By cutting the price of bananas, it threatened to ruin
any small producers who refused to give up
their banana plantations.
Little by little, it took over hundreds of thousands
of hectares of Central America's best land.
(Gael speaks in foreign language)
- [Translator] It's exactly what happened
during the land reforms in Great Britain which began
in the 16th century and carried on until the 18th century.
You had poor British land workers
who were expropriated in the same way.
There's no other word for it.
The land which they cultivated
started to have fences put up around it.
And by the 18th century, they had been obliged
to give up their workforce to the factories
which were beginning to appear.
So in reality, this movement is at the origin
of contemporary industry and economy as we know them today.
It was the founding act of contemporary capitalism.
Did the United Fruit Company
introduce capitalism to Central America?
In any case, it brought in very early on
a certain vision of development and progress.
The train was at the origin
of the good fortune of Minor Cooper Keith,
the founder of the United Fruit Company.
For the young nations of Central America,
it was synonymous with modernity.
Guatemala wanted its own, but the country was in debt.
And when the price of coffee,
its primary resource, collapsed, it could no longer pay.
Their railway was abandoned.
In 1903, Guatemala turned to the one person
able to save it, Minor Cooper Keith.
Minor agreed to take over the work.
In exchange, as usual, he asked for land
for banana plantations and the right to operate
the new train for his own profit.
He also acquired control over the country's main port
as well as the telegraph lines.
And that is how in order to gain a train,
Guatemala gave away to the United Fruit Company
its infrastructures, its economy, and its future.
And thus, the company's empire grew
to the detriment of these new states in search of progress
but with no resources and in debt.
- [Translator] In other words, more often than not,
the debt of the poor helps line the pockets of the rich.
Here, you had an attempt to privatize the totality
of the public sphere through the debt mechanism,
which reiterated the fundamental act of expropriation
of common property to pick the land
for the profit of a very small number.
- [Narrator] The banana-producing countries of the Caribbean
and Central America in this way bound themselves,
one after the other, to the company.
Each time, it obtained the right to pay little or no taxes
to the countries in which it operated,
draining their resources even more
and assuring their dependence.
Thousands of letters have been found
on a plantation in Panama, a massive internal correspondence
which illustrates the daily life of the company
and its long history of tax avoidance.
A letter from a United Fruit Company head to his manager.
Panama, October 26th, 1918.
"Dear Mr. Kyes, while having a chat with the President
"the other day, he asked me why we were so unfair to Panama
"as to pay her only one cent per bunch export taxes.
"We talked over the matter frankly at some length,
"and he finally told me, 'Don't worry,
"'you always have gotten what you want, my friend.'"
"Signed, Carson McFarland."
Republic of Panama, Presidential Offices,
December 17th, 1918.
"To Mr. McFarland, my dear friend, I have received
"the draft legislation concerning tax increases.
"I have sent it to some deputies who are friends of mine
"so they can introduce the modifications
"which you suggest and which I have accepted.
"Your friend, Belisario Porras, President of Panama."
- In the case of the United Fruit,
it had these wonderful tax-free concessions and things.
But honestly, practically every Western company
all over Latin America and Asia had the same conditions.
Basically, they had the bargaining power.
They had the technological advantage and the money.
These places wanted them,
and the deal was very little taxes.
In our age, tax avoidance, or tax planning as its called
in business course, has become a central feature
of business globally, and that's a quite different situation
from when developing fragile states in the 19th century
were offering low taxes.
Now it's the core of business.
- [Translator] Obviously, a multinational may be tempted
to avoid fiscal legislation in the sovereign countries
where it is set up.
To do this, they employ a method which is well-known today,
which is the policy of transfer pricing,
which consists of making profit show up in the accounts
in the most favorable places in terms of taxation.
This is a political issue.
Do we want these sums of money to be given back
to the public authorities, to be used for the common good?
Or do we continue to allow states' fiscal revenue
to be siphoned off by multinationals?
It's a social issue which affects the entire planet.
- [Narrator] What a destiny the banana has,
a simple fruit capable of conquering a Central American
empire and securing a place as an exemplary multinational
with a long future ahead of it.
An American writer, O. Henry, crowned it for posterity.
In his 1904 novel, Cabbages and Kings,
he describes an imaginary state
totally under the thumb of a fruit company.
And for the occasion,
he crafted the expression banana republic.
Wherever you came across them, the United Fruit plantations
were in a world apart, a closed world
governed by the laws of the company alone,
a segregated world.
On one side, the white managers and foremen,
the former, graduates of the best East Coast universities,
the latter, recruited from the south of the United States,
bringing with them their knowledge of slave culture.
The banana plantations were their domain,
an American enclave in the tropics.
They formed an exclusive social entity
with a certain way of life.
Telegram dated the 29th of May, 1919
to the United Fruit Company head office.
"Last lot of laborers are bad, mostly criminal.
"Cannot use Puerto Rican, Panama, Nicaragua laborers.
"Continue sending Jamaican laborers."
The laborers on the plantations constituted the workforce,
a stock which required organizing.
Jamaicans were prized
for their reputed strength and endurance.
They were imported in their tens of thousands
from the island of Jamaica.
They were herded around from plantation to plantation.
Amongst the native population,
Indians were relegated to domestic chores.
The Hispanic people aroused suspicion.
The workers which the company preferred
were those who were uprooted, isolated, and docile.
Unions were forbidden.
A letter from a foreman to his head office,
the 17th of June, 1924.
"I have been in Bocas del Toro, Panama
"with the United Fruit Company since June 1911.
"I am familiar with these laborers and their habits,
"and I know that the least these Negroes and natives know
"about organization, the better off they are."
- [Male Narrator] Entire towns had to be built
by the company to house these workers.
Sometimes large swamps had to be drained.
- [Narrator] The company avoided taxes but prided itself
on creating whole villages in the jungle.
It housed the laborers and their families,
built dispensaries and hospitals,
opened schools for the children of its workers.
Salaries were often paid in vouchers,
which laborers could only spend in the company's own shops
which sold food, clothing, furniture, and tools.
(Cecile speaks in foreign language)
- [Translator] The United Fruit way of doing things
was completely in line with the practices
of a lot of directors of Western companies.
With practices concerning employees, which at best
were paternalistic, social protection was privatized.
But not allowing people to form unions to have a voice means
that from an anthropological point of view,
you don't recognize the freedom,
the fundamental rights of the person.
You basically deny them part of what is the human condition.
And perhaps most importantly, you deny them the capacity
to contribute to the political community
in which they are implicated,
not only because they receive a certain amount
of material gain but also because they're an active
participant who takes part in its transformation.
- [Narrator] Despite the company controlling every moment
of its employees' lives, demands started to be made.
For a six-day week and an eight-hour day,
unemployment benefit and salaries paid in cash.
Throughout Banana Land, anger was growing.
The company became alarmed.
Circular number B21 from the United Fruit Company
general officers to banana division managers.
"I am joining a photograph
"for the purpose of familiarizing you
"with the appearance of Manuel Calix Herrera.
"This man is an agitator of the worst type,
"anti-American, extremist, given to writing and preaching
"Red, Bolshevist, and Communistic propaganda.
"Be on the lookout."
In October 1928, workers at the Santa Marta plantation
in Colombia went on strike.
Negotiations failed.
Strikers attacked buildings on the plantation.
The Colombian government sent in the army.
Over 1,000 died.
The suppression of the Santa Marta strike became known
as the banana massacre, a fundamental point in history
for Colombia and Central America,
the symbol of state submission with use of its public forces
to support the interests of a foreign company.
From then on throughout the Caribbean,
everybody spoke of the Octopus,
the new name for the United Fruit Company.
(upbeat music)
In June 1929, Minor Cooper Keith, the banana pioneer,
the uncrowned king of Central America, died in Costa Rica.
The empire he left behind was immense,
100,000 employees, 1,200,000 hectares of plantations.
In 1910, buying up the British wholesaler, Fyffes,
had opened the doors of Europe to him.
At the time of Minor's death, the United Fruit Company alone
represented three quarters of the world's banana trade.
A few competitors survived in the shadows.
The United Fruit Company tolerated them.
They allowed it to avoid the American anti-trust laws
which forbade monopolies.
The Cuyamel Fruit Company
was the company's principal competitor.
At its head was Samuel Zemurray.
He was tall and gruff, with a strong Russian accent.
He was seen as a visionary,
capable of making bananas grow on the most hostile land.
In 1910, he had overturned the government of Honduras,
which had tried to get in his way,
and he didn't hide the fact.
In Banana Land, this man was a legend.
His was an American destiny.
His story began like so many others on Ellis Island in 1892.
Samuel Zemurray was 15.
He had left his whole family in a shtetl in Bessarabia
to try his luck in America.
They say that he tasted his first banana in Selma, Alabama,
a revelation.
He started out in the docks of Mobile,
a port in the Gulf of Mexico.
That's where he saw the white ships of United Fruit,
the unloading of bananas,
the wheeling and dealing of the traders.
Samuel learned to spot the fruit which no one else wanted,
the bananas which were already ripe
and which it was impossible to transport
quickly enough to far off markets.
He made a bulk purchase for next to nothing.
He hired a wagon, and over the following three days,
he sold his entire stock on the platforms
of the southern stations which he passed through.
With this first trip, he earned $40.
(upbeat music)
Sam the Banana Man had arrived.
Samuel Zemurray stood up to United Fruit for a long time
until his competition became too troublesome for them.
In November 1929, he accepted a merger.
United Fruit bought out his company, Cuyamel.
Samuel received $30 million worth
of United Fruit Company shares.
This made him one of the richest men in the United States
and also United Fruit's biggest shareholder.
In 1933, he dismissed the company's Board of Directors
and took single-handed control of affairs.
One magazine of the time ran the headline,
A Jonah Who Swallowed the Whale.
At 56 years of age,
Samuel Zemurray was the uncontested czar of bananas.
(upbeat music)
An empire cannot stand still.
If it doesn't grow, it falls.
The Second World War froze international trade,
but with the end of the war came the promise
of reconstruction, of growth,
of new markets for United Fruits bananas.
To conquer them, Samuel Zemurray found the right person,
a pioneer of his own kind, the prince of public relations
and publicity, Edward Bernays.
He was a man with the gift of being able to fashion reality
according to his clients' wishes.
In the 1920s, it was this man, Edward Bernays,
who had got American women smoking,
convincing them that the cigarette was a torch of liberty,
the instrument of their emancipation.
This was during his time
working for the powerful American Tobacco Company.
In his book entitled Propaganda, Edward Bernays defended,
in his own words, the conscious and intelligent manipulation
of the organized habits and opinions of the masses
by an enlightened minority.
Could it have been his uncle, Sigmund Freud, who led him
to understand so early on that in a consumer society,
publicity was the key to desire, and that consumer desire
could be created, maintained, and stimulated ad infinitum?
- [Male Narrator] Bananas are a favorite breakfast fruit
in every home, sliced over hot or cold cereal,
a way to top off any dish and help start the day right.
- [Narrator] Samuel Zemurray was to turn the banana
into the fruit of American dreams.
- [Male Narrator] We know you like bananas.
♪ I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say ♪
♪ Bananas have to ripen in a certain way ♪
♪ And when they're flecked with brown ♪
♪ And have a golden hue ♪
♪ Bananas taste the bed and are the best for you ♪
- [Narrator] Miss Chiquita Banana burst onto
the radio waves and television screens.
She was everywhere.
♪ The way you're looking means that you are ripe for cooking ♪
♪ I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say ♪
♪ That I rarely use refrigerators up this way ♪
♪ I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say ♪
♪ That you really shouldn't treat a fellowman this way ♪
♪ If you like to be refined and civilized ♪
♪ Your eating habits really ought to be revised ♪
Her tone of voice and curvaceous form was similar
to those of the a star of the time, Carmen Miranda,
the Brazilian in the Tutti-frutti hat
who featured in Hollywood comedies.
This was not by chance.
Carmen Miranda was South America as the United States
wished to portray it, exotic, eccentric,
but close by, a continuation of itself.
♪ The lady in the Tutti-frutti hat ♪
In the ideal world of Miss Chiquita Banana,
each banana was calibrated both by form and by taste.
The company only produced one variety, the Gros Michel,
tasty, fleshy, resistance, and therefore, exportable.
Ever more needed to be produced.
- [Male Narrator] But it is not enough
to have the right conditions for the bananas to flourish.
It is also necessary to fight constantly
the diseases that can ruin whole plantations.
- [Narrator] On the plantations weakened
by intensive monoculture, two virulent parasites
were spreading, Panama disease and Yellow Sigatoka.
Miss Chiquita Banana's swaying hips
couldn't hide the reality.
The empire was rotting from the inside.
Samuel Zemurray had tons of pesticide poured over
the banana plants relentlessly, up to 30 times a year.
Those who volunteered received the best pay.
They were known as the veneneros, the poisoners.
Very soon, their skin took on a blue tint.
They fell ill.
Dozens died.
- [Male Narrator] See how each bunch
is dipped several times.
Great care is taken to see that the bunches are clean
before they leave the plantation.
- [Narrator] From 10 years,
the lifetime of a plantation fell to three.
The infected ones were abandoned.
The jungle was cut down to create new ones, always more,
as though Central America could be totally
given over to United Fruit.
- [Translator] It's impressive, because you realize
that it's also a parable of the perverse effects
of capitalism and the logic of accumulation.
After all, the logic intrinsic to capitalism
is the accumulation of capital, of which there is no
foreseeable end, with the idea that the resources being used
are available in indefinite, not to say infinite quantity.
What is sadly wonderful in this example is seeing
how the company should have realized that it was not at all
in their interests, and that it was indulging in completely
criminal practices with regards to those who were losing
their lives, to carry on feeding a machine which,
quite apart from the environmental implications
and consequently, future profits,
from an economic activity point of view, was useless.
In the end, this self-perpetuating logic requires someone,
be it a board, an institution, or a leader,
to step in and say, "Stop everything.
"We need to find another way of doing things."
(male narrator speaks in foreign language)
- [Narrator] In 1944, revolution came to Guatemala.
It put an end to the 14-year reign on the dictator, Ubico,
the best friend of the United Fruit Company.
Ubico saw himself as the reincarnation of Napoleon
and was so protective of his power that he banned the use
of the word strike, petition, and union.
He believed in forced labor for the poorest
and in the lowest possible salaries.
The agreements which he signed with United Fruit
were highly favorable for them.
- Multinationals like United Fruit
sought stability for its investments.
Democracies can be very unstable.
I mean there's a reason why multinational investment
is very low in India, and the reason is it's a democracy
where there are multiple parties
always sort of checking deals, negotiating everything.
And that's a veritable nightmare for multinationals,
and they prefer as they operate in China, for example,
where provided the Communist Party
approves of your activities, you'll have a high degree
of stability and things will basically,
you won't run into any sort of trouble.
So I think that's what multinationals are after,
some sort of security and stability, and tin pot dictators
or the Communist Party can give you that.
(upbeat music)
- [Narrator] With its promise of labor laws,
union rights, and minimum wage, the Guatemalan revolution
certainly offered no reassurance
concerning the company's business affairs.
In 1951, free elections
brought Colonel Jacobo Arbenz to power.
Despite his Germanic origins, he had grown up
in the poverty of a high plains village.
He was a white man brought up
amongst Guatemala's underprivileged, Indians of Maya origin.
Jacobo Arbenz set about putting into practice
the first promise of the revolution, land reform
which would redistribute the land of the large owners
to the small farmers.
But at the top of the list of large owners
with more than two thirds of the country's agricultural land
was the United Fruit Company.
- [Male Narrator] Almost two thirds of its population
is of Indian descent living primitively,
barely getting sustenance from the soil
in a nation of many large, efficiently run plantations
geared to produce maximum profit.
- Arbenz dared to take them on.
By decree, he confiscated hundreds of thousands
of hectares of land which the company kept in reserve.
The indemnities were derisory.
They were based on the company's tax declarations
which had always underestimated the value.
United Fruit had never before been defied in this way.
In his youth, Samuel Zemurray had had no qualms
about overturning a troublesome government.
This time, with no mercenaries at hand, he once again
turned to the public relations genius, Edward Bernays.
It was up to him to deal with Arbenz.
Bernays was to employ a technique
of which he was the master, transforming reality.
He set about turning the protection of United Fruit's
private interests in Guatemala into a cause
for the United States, making the banana a strategic pawn.
Edward Bernays was to create a fiction
for 1950s America submerged in the Cold War.
- [Male Narrator] In this Guatemalan town of Esquipulas,
just occupied by anti-government forces--
- [Narrator] Social democrat, nationalist, reformer,
Jacobo Arbenz was depicted as a communist pledged to Moscow,
the face of the red peril
which threatened America versus the free world.
Edward Bernays needed to win over public opinion.
He opened a Central American information bureau,
organized press visits, and suggested themes for articles
to newspaper owners who he was close to.
- So Bernays really understood it's not what is happening.
It's the story you tell about
what is happening that is the reality.
And that's something he was greatly admired and studied
in Nazi Germany who carried (mumbles) truth
to another level, and now we see in our present world
with social networks and much else, the story intensifying
with all its severe consequences for democracy.
But we could already see where it was going to lead
with episodes like Bernays and United Fruit.
- [Narrator] The context was right
for Edward Bernays' power play.
In November 1952, the Republican Dwight Eisenhower
was elected president of the United States.
- So help you, God.
- [Eisenhower] So help me, God.
- [Narrator] After years of policies designed
to contain communism, he advocated a frontal offensive.
He placed two brothers in key posts.
John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State.
Alan Dulles was put in charge of the CIA.
Both of them had been close legal advisers
to the United Fruit Company.
As for the new Ambassador to the United Nations,
this was none other than the flamboyant senator,
Henri Cabot Lodge, a faithful lobbyist
for the company's interests,
whose family were longstanding shareholders.
These were all people tuned in to Edward Bernays' message.
- Mr. Dulles, I know you've heard of this many times,
that there are people who say that we,
with regard to the CIA, are waging a secret war
with an invisible government.
- We are obviously engaged in many facets
of what is generally called the Cold War
which the communist policies forced upon us.
But may I say this, and I do it with all solemnity,
at no time has the CIA engaged
in any political activity or any intelligence activity
that was not approved at the highest level.
- [Narrator] In August 1953,
Alan Dulles' CIA began a new means of attack.
In Iran, it overturned the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh
who had nationalized his country's petrol industry.
He was accused of communist collusion.
Petrol before bananas?
The success of the Iranian operation
convinced the Eisenhower administration.
The CIA was given the green light
to take action in Guatemala.
The operation was named Success.
The patient lobbying by Edward Bernays had born fruit.
(upbeat music)
The CIA chose an opponent
for the Arbenz regime,
Colonel Castillo Armas.
It placed him at the head of a national liberation army
which it was training.
The plantations of the United Fruit Company
were used as rear guard bases.
In June 1954, the capital, Guatemala City, was bombed.
Overpowered, Jacobo Arbenz stood down
on the 27th of June in a radio announcement.
(Jacobo speaks in foreign language)
Having become president with support from the United States,
Castillo Armas canceled the measures
taken by the Arbenz government.
Land reform was abandoned.
United Fruit had its lands given back,
but neither stability nor security returned.
Following the coup de etat,
Guatemala was thrown into civil war
which continued until 1996, leaving more than 100,000 dead,
a million displaced, and tens of thousands missing.
The Maya Indians were the principal victims
with talk of genocide.
- So United Fruit built a highly successful business model,
and it could not care less
what kind of damage it did to Guatemala.
The Arbenz coup destroyed the country,
ruined it for 50 years.
Now we have a bunch of tech firms now who have developed
extremely successful business models,
but there is almost no evidence that they are thinking about
the societal consequences of what they're doing.
So we know from the last US presidential election
that Facebook was a massive driver
of fake news, big, big, big time.
So these are really big, really,
really big societal consequences you can see,
and companies are just doing their business model
very successfully and have no way of incorporating,
I think, into their thinkings the so whats,
what does that mean for society.
And that's what United Fruit and its equivalents did.
(Gael speaks in foreign language)
- [Translator] The development of countries of the south
cannot be conferred exclusively upon private multinationals
who, as long as their mandate remains to maximize
shareholders' profits, represent a potential threat
for a number of southern populations in the sense
that they are always tempted to privatize all the resources
which communities depend upon for their livelihood.
This doesn't mean to say that these multinationals
are not also a part of the solution.
It means they need to be reorganized with a social objective
as opposed to just maximum stock market value.
Of course, there are initiatives
which lean in this direction within the context
of what we might call social and solidarity economics.
But on the whole, it has to be remarked
that many multinationals still have
a lot of progress to make in these matters.
- [Narrator] So as not to jeopardize either its functioning
or its fortune, the United Fruit Company
blocked any reform in Guatemala.
As a result, it became a focal point for anger.
In January 1959, Cuban revolutionaries took Havana
and overthrew the Batista regime
supported by the United States.
Ernesto Guevara, the Che,
the lieutenant of Fidel Castro, was in Guatemala.
He had been radicalized by the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz.
He no longer believed in reform.
Revolution needed to be total.
In 1960, Fidel Castro nationalized
all North American businesses.
(Fidel speaks in foreign language)
This time, both Edward Bernays
and Samuel Zemurray were powerless.
The czar of bananas died in 1961.
His empire did not outlive him.
The United Fruit Company disappeared
in successive takeovers and mergers.
It was replaced by Chiquita brands.
Overpowered by disease,
the Gros Michel bananas which had made its fortune
disappeared at the end of the '60s.
Another banana emerged,
the Cavendish.
It had been developed by a small competitor,
soon to become an agricultural giant,
the new leader of the banana market, Dole.
(woman vocalizing)
- [Male Narrator] The Dole banana.
If you feel it, peel it.
- [Narrator] According to latest reports,
the Cavendish banana may, in its turn, be on the way out.
Workers for Dole tried in vain to have the company condemned
for poisoning by pesticide.
As for Chiquita brands, the heir to United Fruit,
it was recently in a legal battle concerning the financing
of paramilitary groups in Colombia.
That was the story of a fruit, a simple fruit.
(upbeat music)
♪ I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say ♪
♪ Bananas have to ripen in a certain way ♪
♪ When they are flecked with brown and have a golden hue ♪
♪ Bananas taste the best and are the best for you ♪
♪ You can put them in a salad ♪
♪ You can put them in a pie-aye-aye ♪
♪ Any way you want to eat them ♪
♪ It's impossible to beat them ♪
♪ But bananas like the climate ♪
♪ Of the very, very tropical equator ♪
♪ So you should never put bananas in the refrigerator ♪