A young English superintendent met me at Quiriguá, one of the United Fruit Company’s plantations, and conducted me to a cottage with screened verandas, where one might have fancied himself in the Americanized Canal Zone. The camp was neatly laid out, with well-trimmed grass-plots and cement walks lined by rows of yellow croton and red hibiscus and shaded by coco-palms or breadfruit trees. Each superintendent had his own cottage; there was a large hotel for the lesser gringo employees; the local hospital was the largest and best-appointed in Central America; everywhere one observed that orderliness and modernity wherewith the Anglo-Saxon is constantly abolishing the local color of all foreign lands.
On all sides of the camp the banana groves extended as far as the eye could follow them, like a rank uncut lawn of brilliant green. Narrow-gage tracks wandered out in all directions through the lanes of trees, and many gringo bosses—all clean-cut young fellows, neatly dressed in khaki, who did their bit to destroy the fictional romance of the tropics by shaving each morning and donning a white collar—were spinning along the rails upon motor-cars on their way to work.
Many years ago, one Minor C. Keith, while building a railway in Costa Rica, hit upon the idea of planting bananas along the line in order to provide freight for his own road. When, during a financial panic, he was unable to pay his laborers, he performed the miracle of persuading them to work for nine months without salary. He and his assistants drained swamps and practically eliminated malaria long before our Canal Zone doctors learned to combat the fever-carrying mosquito. He formed a partnership with one Andrew W. Preston, the first man to transport bananas in any quantity to the United States, and out of that combination grew the United Fruit Company, which to-day has plantations in Jamaica, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, and British Honduras, and controls the banana industry of the world. It owns railways throughout Central America, and operates its own line of ships. It is said to make and unmake governments, although no one ever proves the accusation. It escapes prosecution in American courts as a monopoly because its properties are mostly located in foreign countries. But it has developed a large section of jungle-land that once was considered worthless and uninhabitable; the money it pays in taxes for its concessions is the mainstay of more than one Central-American nation’s finances; and it supplies the world with bananas on a policy of “small profits on a tremendous scale.”
Guatemala is one of its smallest production sources, and Quiriguá is one of its smallest Guatemalan plantations, yet I spent an entire day riding through the banana groves on a motor-car with a superintendent, and saw but a small part of them.
“The banana’s the easiest thing on earth to grow,” explained my guide, as the little car hummed over the endless tracks. “You just select the right land—the silt of some river bottom—and burn off the jungle. Then you plant them—using the suckers, or bulbs that spring up around an old tree—set them out in rows. And there’s nothing more to do except keep them clear of brush. In eight months you’ve got bananas. The main problem is to pick them just green enough so they’ll ripen by the time they reach the States—a little bit greener for England—and get them there when the home fruits are not in season.”
From time to time we passed a row of laborers’ shacks. Some of the Jamaicans had brought their own kinky-haired women with them. Others had found Guatemalan girls. A host of picaninnies were tumbling about each cottage. Now and then one heard the rattle of dice, and a snatch of music from a mouth organ.
“Most of the men are working to-day,” said the superintendent. “We pay them by the job, and not by the week. It brings more satisfactory results in a warm climate. They like it, too, because they can work when they please. But this is a boat day, and we’ve taught them to work on boat days.”
A BANANA-BOAT LOADING ON THE EAST COAST
Negroes with machetes were cutting down the bananas. A banana tree is only a soft, spongy thing, like the stem of a huge lily. A blow of the machete would half sever the trunk, and the tree would bend, bringing the bunch of fruit within reach. The negroes would hack away the leaves, and remove the banana stalk carefully.