Word: banana
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Their most embarrassing lack, for a time, was paper. They had to use cigaret papers, bamboo bark and banana leaves. Then one day the considerate Japanese showered their bivouac with printed broadsides demanding surrender. The Sparrows were grateful...
Through half a century and three wars United Fruit Co. has grown to a $192 million empire. Before the war it raised and merchandised about 65% of the world's banana crop, operated a banana fleet of 80-odd trim white ships, had 126,000 acres of banana land under cultivation. Today all but a dozen of the oldest and slowest of these ships have gone to war (some of the best refrigerated ships have ignobly hauled steel ingots across the Atlantic), and the old hulks still in the Caribbean service must load high priority coffee, sugar, cocoa before...
...this means much more than just another corporate dislocation caused by the war. United Fruit's troubles are also the troubles of Central America, 80% of whose monthly crop of 100,000 tons of bananas rots in the fields for lack of shipping to the U.S. Broke and disillusioned, the people of five banana-exporting Central American republics (Panama, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras) are now angry at the United Nations' policy that annihilated their chief export but failed to provide them with any other means of employment. The problem is all the more acute since Government revenues...
...bandages, their green uniforms stained grey with mud, their faces lined, insect-bitten, haggard, sometimes fever-yellowed. Men with torn limbs lie, eyes closed, on crude log stretchers, borne on the muscled shoulders of kindly, perpetually plodding, splayfooted natives. A native walks beside each man, holding a huge green banana leaf to keep the burning sun from the head of the soldier, who has found that the war learned at the Louisiana maneuvers is a very different thing from the war learned in the jungles of Papua...
Near the top of that hill we found a little hovel roofed by dripping banana leaves. Into this squalid hole two Chinese had crawled to die. One had already done so. I filled the dying man's rusty tin with water from a stream. He thanked me and fumbling feebly in his clothes offered me a battered cigaret. I did not accept...