Bananas

are more discreet abroad, unsure what the new limits are on their quest for profit. United Fruit's decline opens new options for Central American nationalists. Expropriation is no longer heresy, regulation is almost taken for granted, and even some control seems feasible.

In this case, the $1.25 million bribe that United Brands is alleged to have paid President Oswaldo Lopez Arellano is not an aberration, nor a return to the old days of banana republic politics, but a paradoxical confirmation of how far the role of United Fruit has evolved. In the spring of 1974, seven banana exporting countries got together and tried to assemble a banana producer's cartel in the style of OPEC. This might seem ludicrous, but the fact is that bananas are by far the world's most popular fruit, accounting for more than 40 per cent of the world trade in fresh fruits. Their initial goal was to levy a dollar tax on every box of bananas. Ecuador, the biggest producer, dropped out first, and finally only Panama held the line. Honduras agreed to a 25-cent tax. To be sure the agreement would hold, United Fruit paid someone in the Honduran government half of a $2.5 million bribe; soon afterward, a group of young officers overthrew President Lopez Arellano. While the corruption is a classic theme, the fact is that United Fruit had to negotiate under the pressure of a tax on bananas, and in the face of a United Front, however short-lived.

United Fruit has renamed itself United Brands, symbolizing the neutralization of its image and its power. It is getting older, weaker, and somehow more real. The banana plantations are still there, as ghostly as ever now that the banana bunches grow inside plastic bags on the trees, but they no longer exude their malevolent smell of intimidation. The local managers are smoothies instead of rednecks, and the worders are a well-off aristocracy of labor rather than serfs. The company has even gotten out of landowning, and prefers marketing and shipping.

McCann is sentimental when he calls Eli Black's suicide and the decline of United Fruit a tragedy. He has fastened onto the right image, but for the wrong people: it is unlikely that many tears were shed in Tegucigalpa. Black's plunge from the Pan American Building was the fall of the patriarch, the bringing to earth of the gods; it marks the era of United Fruit's demythification. This book shows that the times has passed in which the company and its work could only be described in fiction or polemic. It is time for a real historian to start dissecting the Octopus.