Original subtitles

(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 ♪