Word: banana
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From Progreso or Vera Cruz, it is an easy sail across the Gulf to the mouth of the Mississippi, and soon, from Caribbean ports like Puerto Barrios, the banana boats will again be putting out regularly for the voyage north to New Orleans. Many latinos-from Mexico and Yucatán and the other lands around the Caribbean-come mainly to shop in Canal Street department stores (where Spanish-speaking clerks are numerous), play in the French quarter (with its association with 18th-Century Spanish governors), study at Tulane's Department of Tropical Medicine, and take treatment...
...years changed the political climate. Democratic gusts blew down the Ubico dictatorship in Guatemala, today whistle ominously through the pinetops of Carías' 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 Carías' 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...
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 abacá acreage go back to bush, United Fruit plans to let laborers have the land (which it got for little or nothing) and raise abacá 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...
...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 3⅓ 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...