Banana Republic

The banana republic, a country with a single-purpose economy, originated with the introduction of the banana fruit to Europe in 1870, by Captain Lorenzo D. Baker, of the ship The Telegraph, who initially bought bananas in Jamaica and sold them in Boston at a 1,000 percent profit. Dietarily, the banana proved a popular food with Americans, because it was a nutritious tropical fruit cheaper in price than local U.S. fruit, such as the apple; in 1913, a dozen bananas sold for twenty-five cents, while the same quarter-dollar-money bought only two apples. Yet the banana business was incidentally established, by the American railroad tycoons Henry Meiggs and his nephew, Minor C. Keith, who, in 1873, established banana plantations — initially along the railroads proper — to produce food-stuffs with which to feed the men working on the railroad. Upon grasping the potential profitability of exporting to and selling bananas in the U.S., Meiggs and Keith then exported the fruit to the Southeastern United States.

In the mid-1870s, to manage the new industrial-agriculture business enterprise in the countries of Central America, Keith founded the Tropical Trading and Transport Company; one-half of the future United Fruit Company (Chiquita Brands International), created in 1899, by corporate merger with the Boston Fruit Company, owned by Andrew Preston. By the 1930s, the international influence (political and economic) of the United Fruit Company granted it control of 80–90 per cent of the U.S. banana trade. Nonetheless, despite the UFC monopoly, in 1924, the Vaccaro Brothers established the Standard Fruit Company (Dole Food Company) to export Honduran bananas to the port of New Orleans, in the Gulf of Mexico coast of the U.S. The fruit exporters profited from such low U.S. prices because the banana companies, by their manipulation of the national land use laws of the producing countries, were able to cheaply buy large tracts of prime agricultural land for banana plantations in the countries of the Caribbean Basin, the Central American isthmus, and the tropical South American countries; and employ the native peoples as cheap-wage, manual labourers, after having rendered them landless, by means of legalistic dispossession.

Moreover, by the late 19th century, three American multinational corporations — the United Fruit Company, the Standard Fruit Company, and the Cuyamel Fruit Company — dominated the cultivation, harvesting, and exportation of bananas, and controlled the road, rail, and port infrastructure of Honduras. In the north coast, on the Caribbean Sea, the Honduran government ceded to the banana companies 500 hectares (1,235.52 acres) for each kilometre of railroad laid; yet there was no passenger or freight railroad to Tegucigalpa, the national capital city. To Honduran people, the United Fruit Company was El Pulpo, The Octopus, that economically pervaded their society, controlled their country's transport infrastructure, and sometimes violently manipulated the national politics of the Republic of Honduras.