Bananas Are Back

In the mountains of Guatemala and along the rivers of Honduras the long trains rolled again. Bananas were coming back. The green fruit, lovingly bedded on banana leaves, was headed for the hatches of United Fruit ships, and ultimately for U.S. breakfast tables. Last week some 100,000,000 bananas arrived in the U.S.

War had sorely bruised Central America's banana trade. In 1943 it shrank to less than a shriveled fifth of prewar normal. While the banana liners were diverted to more pressing runs, the golden fruit was left to rot where it grew. United Fruit, first lord of the banana empire, maintained its dividends mainly through revenue from ships and Cuban sugar estates. In Central America, United helped make up for U.S. losses of Manila hemp (and incidentally kept Central Americans employed) by cultivating needed abaca.

War over, republics like Honduras, four-fifths of whose business was in bananas, were eager for normalcy. The $190,000,000 United Fruit Co., with an annual budget bigger than that of any Central American country, had a stake at least as big. But wartime had brought changes.

The trend was now away from the steaming Caribbean coast to the drier country on the Pacific side and to new areas in the Dominican Republic. Symbolizing the changing course of banana empire, United Fruit's "Great White Fleet" would operate on a large scale for the first time in the Pacific. There, presumably, it would continue to accommodate passengers in the spirit of the Great White Fleet's unofficial motto: "Every banana a guest, every passenger a pest."

Democratic Blowdowns. The war years changed the political climate. Democratic gusts blew down the Ubico dictatorship in Guatemala, today whistle ominously through the pinetops of Carias' Honduras. In the roaring times when it was never clear which went first, the U.S. flag or the U.S. dollar, to old banana hands such winds would have signaled hurricane warnings. For politically minded United Fruit was deeply involved in Dictators Ubico's and Carias' rise to power. But wily Sam Zemurray, United's big boss, radar-keen in detecting a gale, had fore-handedly trimmed sail. Now a United Fruit executive in Central America can hardly take a drink in the presence of a Honduran political exile without cursing the Carias tyranny. Says old (69) Sam Zemurray: "These are democratic times."

Long ago Sam Zemurray decided that the banana business must cease ignoring public opinion in the tiny lands where it operated. Well aware of the hatred of Central Americans not lucky enough to share its prosperity, he tempered the irresponsible tactics that had served well enough in the freebooting days of dollar diplomacy. Ten years ago there was not a school in the outlying banana farms; today, United Fruit provides free schooling (and milk enough to please Henry Wallace) for every worker's child. Its hospitals, open to all, are the tropics' best.

Reconversion. Gone--according to Sam Zemurray--are the reckless, nomadic days of banana planting when United Fruit used to rip out railway tracks from diseased plantations, leaving laborers to shift for themselves in the jungle. Now, rather than let its wartime abaca acreage go back to bush, United Fruit plans to let laborers have the land (which it got for little or nothing) and raise abaca as a peacetime "peasant crop." In 1944 the company opened an agricultural school at El Zamorano, Honduras, to train scientific dirt farmers free of charge.

At Tiquisate, on Guatemala's Pacific coast, United Fruit grows bananas the new way. On what were 25,000 acres of malarial wasteland in 1934, the company has kept 7,000 laborers busy at the sort of work that makes modern banana growing a feat of agricultural engineering. Example: from tall, movable towers giant sprinklers play over 3 1/3 acres of banana trees in a swoop, supplying the equivalent of two inches of rainfall a week. A second complicated set of pumps and pipes squirts the bright blue Bordeaux mixture that keeps off the sigatoka disease.

On United's new plantations on the Pacific coast and in the Dominican Republic, homes for workers--complete with kitchen and Stateside toilet--are as big an advance over older hovels as a Park Avenue apartment over a cold-water flat. Minimum wages, though still less than $1 a day, are half again as high as those paid on Guatemalan-owned plantations.

Conversion or Adjustment? Central Americans display a wary reluctance to believe that Saul has become Paul, but such timely changes have won some friends among old critics of United Fruit. In Costa Rica, where United Fruit donated land for labor colonies, Communist-controlled unions named one of the settlements "Colonia Hamer," after the company's Costa Rican manager. Judicious wage increases have also spared United Fruit some labor headaches, but they may not save it from the projected new labor code's provisions for social security, hospitalization at company expense, and overtime pay, which are expected to cost the company a million dollars a year.

Guatemala's Arevalo government also recently introduced a steep profits tax, despite a concession wangled from Ubico forbidding new taxation on United Fruit till 1981. Bargaining is tough. With huge new plantations in the Dominican Republic ready to sprout bananas by 1947, United Fruit can threaten to shut down in Guatemala, as it did in Colombia when disease and the government moved in.

But last week the doughty Guatemalans had come forward with a counter-threat. Under the presidency of Foreign Minister Eugenio Silva Pena, independent planters had discussed a new marketing cooperative to export bananas independently of United Fruit. Once, that would have signaled war without question. Now there would probably be a compromise. Explained Sam Zemurray: "We adjust."

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