Bananas

[pynchonoid]

GR, p 678 Chiquita Banana "sez we shouldn't" put
bananas in the refrigerator"



http://www.globalexchange.org/economy/bananas/bibliography.html


http://www.nancymatson.com/CLDWR3.HTM
"Spies, Communism, and Bananas: How and Why the CIA
overthrew a government that led to 40 years of brutal
repression - Part Three of the Cold War unit" 




http://www.unitedfruit.org/chronology.html

1945	
Juan Jose Arevalo takes power as the new President of
Guatemala. He pushes United Fruit to improve the
working conditions at its plantations. The company
makes some concessions after a series of strikes from
its workers.

The character of Miss Chiquita Banana debuts in the
technicolor movie advertisement "Miss Chiquita
Banana's Beauty Treatment" in which she sings to
revive an exhausted houwewife. 

1947	The Guatemalan government establishes a Labor
Code. The company denounces it as "Communistic" and
threatens to leave Guatemala. The code forces the
company to make further concessions to the workers in
the strikes that followed.


1949	Senators Claude Pepper (Florida), Alexander Wiley
(Wisconsin), and Mike Mansfield (Montana) accuse the
Guatemalan government of failing to safeguard United
Fruit's businesses in that country. [...]

1951	Jacobo Arbenz wins the Presidential election in
Guatemala and promises to change the agrarian
structure of the country.
1952	The Guatemalan Congress approves the Decree 900,
the Agrarian Reform Act. 
1953	Using the Agrarian Reform Act Arbenz government
declares that 209,842 acres of uncultivated lands of
United Fruit should be expropriated and distributed to
landless peasants. The Guatemalan government promises
the company an indemnification of $627,572 in
governmental bonds. The value of this indemnification
was based on the company's declared tax value of the
land. During this year Zemurray hires a public
relations company to begin an aggressive campaign
against Arbenz in the American media.
1954	
GUATEMALA:
April 20. United States Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles sends a protest note to Arbenz declaring that
the idemnification value calculated by the Guatemalan
government was not fair. Arbenz, however, continued
with his Agrarian Reform Program. Dulles calls John
Peurifoy, the American ambassador in Guatemala, to get
detailed information of the Guatemalan situation.
Peurifoy said to the Congress that Guatemala was
spreading "Marxist tentacles" in Central America.

Zemurray approves the publication of a book called
"Report on Guatemala" which claimed that Arbenz
Agrarian Reform had been planned in Moscow. The book
was distributed to Congressmen

March. The Conference of the Organization of American
States in Caracas finishes with a resolution in which
the member countries show their concern about the
"Communistic infiltration" in the continent.

May: Arbenz proposes a non-aggression treaty to
Honduras. The Honduras government refuses.

June, 18. Using military bases in Nicaragua Guatemalan
Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas attacks Guatemala in
what his supporters called "the Liberation war against
Communism." The operation was backed by all the other
Central American governments and the United States.
Castillo succeeded at forcing Arbenz to go on exile
and immediately ended the legal actions against United
Fruit under the Agrarian Reform Law. Twenty-five year
old Argentinean Ernesto Guevara (later known as el
"Che") witnesses the coup and becomes convinced that
radical changes in Latin America are only possible
through an armed revolution. Guevara is living in
Guatemala at the time working as a doctor and
book-seller and he volunteers to organize resistance
militias against Castillo's army. When facing an
inevitable defeat he later escapes from Guatemala to
Mexico where he meets another political refugee who
will become one of his closest friends: Cuban Fidel
Castro.  [...] 

July 13. United States President Dwight Eisenhower
gives official recognition to Castillo's government.
[...]

1956	
The Senate's Select Committee on Small Business,
undertakes a investigation of "the problems of small
business" and calls on United Fruit to testify on its
commercial distribution of bananas within the US. The
State Department immediately requests that the Senate
hearings be closed to the public and press. It
explains that "distorted or sensational reporting of
these hearings in the Latin American press might
reflect unfavorably on a large American company having
extensive operations in the area, and might easily be
used by the Communists for propaganda purposes to
damage the prestige of the United States." Several
days later, however, the State Department finds
"nothing objectionable" and allows the release of the
transcripts to the press.

 

1958	The US government's anti-trust against the
company is finally settled. The United Fruit Company
agrees to sign a consent decrees that allows the
company to admit to no wrongdoing but still allows the
government to force several important changes to the
structure of the company. The largest change facing
the company is that it has to carve out a competitor,
from its own holding, by 1970, will be one third of
its current size. It begins by selling its Guatemala
holdings to both Standard Fruit and to Guatemalan
entrepreneurs. United Fruit also sells Meloripe and
Banana Selling Corporation, its two large American
fruit distributing subsidiaries, to private banana
jobbing firms. The lawsuit, at least symbolically,
marks the decline of the fruit company.

United Fruit does, however, expand its business in
other directions by acquiring the rights to explore
petroleum and natural gas in Colombia, Panama, and
Ecuador. 

November. Fidel Castro takes power in Cuba after a
successful guerrilla war against President Fulgencio
Batista. Batista leaves the country. 
1959	
Fidel Castro begins his agrarian reform and seizes the
sugar properties of United Fruit in that country.
[...]

1967	
[...] Gabriel Garcia Marquez publishes the first
edition of "Cien A‹os de Soledad" (One Hundred Years
of Solitude) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Part of the
novel is inspired on the strike of the Colombian
banana workers against United Fruit in 1929.



http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/guatemala.html
"At the end of May, the Central Intelligence Agency
declassified 1,400 pages of reports on the 1954 coup
it engineered in Guatemala to remove president Jacobo
Arbenz from office. Arbenz became a target of U.S.
imperialism for threatening to carry out modest land
reforms against the interests of produce giant, United
Fruit Company. In 1952, U.S. president Harry Truman
gave the secret police approval to begin shipping guns
and money to opposition forces and training
mercenaries. 
The released documents show that CIA cops trained
assassins to kill 58 people put on a "disposal list."
They include a 22-page how-to manual on murder. Secret
intelligence officials claim none of the missions were
carried out. The list of CIA targets were also
subjected to "nerve war," which included death
threats, phone calls "preferably between 2 and 5
A.M.," frame-ups, and other forms of intimidation.
Less than 1 percent of the CIA files on the Guatemala
coup were included in the declassification, with many
details blacked out. "


http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/extra/bananas.html


Pynchon + Bananas, juxtaposed:
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/news/newsletters/2002/summer/11.html













 











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