Word: fruits
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Today, Schlesinger is pleasantly surprised by the success of Bitter Fruit, now in its third printing. "When we first started the project in 1976, there was little interest in this country for Latin America," he says. "We had trouble finding a publisher, when we did we got almost no advance, and we had to hold down other jobs while we worked on the book...
...relevance of Bitter Fruit. Schlesinger claims, is "almost cerie." He draws a striking parallel between the Eisenhower Administration and President Reagan's Washington. "It seemed inconceivable to me that a government like Eisenhower's with John Foster Dulles could come back into power in this country," he says. "Then you wake up one day and find Ronald Reagan in the White House and Al Haig as Secretary of State mounting the same polemical statements about communism in Central America as Eisenhower...
...distant nation should be deposed for the sake of a bunch of banana salesmen may seem absurd and even comical. Mostly though, it is terrifying. Arbenz's policies--essentially the legalization of labor unions and a modest land reform that expropriated only unused fields, including much of United Fruits holdings--were hardly those of a Marxist revolutionary Nor did they pose a lethal threat to United Fruit's interests, its fruit-producing lands remained untouched But America, caught up in the hysteria of McCarthysim and the Cold War, flinched. The reflex to react immediately and decisively against any perceived danger...
...their engrossing book Bitter Fruit, Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer tell the previously untold tale of the American coup in Guatemala. Using government documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the authors recount in a straight forward but not simplistic manner the details of Arbenz's overthrow For an American. Bitter Fruit makes agonizing reading: the arrogance. Callousness and stupidity of our countrymen is hard to swallow...
...course, the CIA coup was more than just the haphazard act of a virulently anti-communist administration. As Schlesinger and Kinzer tell it, the United Fruit Company, which had been well-entrenched in Guatemala since the turn of the century and profited enormously from a succession of anti-labor right wing dictators, felt threatened by Arbenz's reforms. So United Fruit called on its many friends in Washington--including Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, director of the CIA--to take action. Thanks to an impressive public relations campaign, the company managed to paint Arbenz...