Word: fruit
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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 Fruit executive in Central America can hardly take a drink...
...over, republics like Honduras, four-fifths of whose business was in bananas, were eager for normalcy. The $190,000,000 United Fruit Co., with an annual budget bigger than that of any Central American country, had a stake at least as big. But wartime had brought changes...
...trend was now away from the steaming Caribbean coast to the drier country on the Pacific side and to new areas in the Dominican Republic. Symbolizing the changing course of banana empire, United Fruit's "Great White Fleet" would operate on a large scale for the first time in the Pacific. There, presumably, it would continue to accommodate passengers in the spirit of the Great White Fleet's unofficial motto: "Every banana a guest, every passenger a pest...
...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...