Sublime

About a mile away from the Orleans Ballroom, on St. Charles Avenue, stands the old headquarters of the United Fruit Company. There they traded in bananas, shaped the history of Central America, and provided the template for the modern multinational corporation. The heyday of United Fruit can be traced to Samuel Zemurray. In 1877, he was born to a

The other dominant banana company in New Orleans was founded by two Sicilian immigrants, the Vaccaro brothers, in 1899. They began with the importation of bananas from Honduras. They flourished because they bought up the city’s ice factories in order to preserve the bananas. At the time, the company was known as Standard Fruit, and is now part of

In 1885, Boston entrepreneur Andrew Preston* and a partner formed the Boston Fruit Company, with the idea of using fast steamships, rather than sail, to get bananas to market before they spoiled. It was a success: Inexpensive, delicious bananas took the country by storm. By the turn of the century Boston Fruit, which was later merged into the

By 1934, every sugar cane farm in Puerto Rico belonged to one of forty-one syndicates, 80 percent of which were US owned; the four largest syndicates—Central Guánica, Central Aguirre, Fajardo Sugar, and United Porto Rico Sugar—were entirely US owned and covered over half the island’s arable land.15

A lo largo de sus viajes, Zemurray había descubierto el banano en las selvas de Centroamérica y, con una intuición feliz del provecho comercial que podía sacar de aquella fruta, comenzó a llevarla en lanchas a Nueva Orleans y otras ciudades norteamericanas. Desde el principio tuvo mucha aceptación. Tanta que la creciente demanda lo llevó a

Así había comenzado la relación entre estos dos hombres disímiles, el refinado publicista que se creía un académico y un intelectual, y el rudo Sam Zemurray, hombre que se había hecho a sí mismo, empresario aventurero que, empezando con unos ahorros de ciento cincuenta dólares, había levantado una compañía que —aunque su apariencia no lo delatara—

By 1905, the banana trade was United Fruit. The company owned the most ships, planted the most fields, had the most money, and controlled both supply and demand: supply by planting more or less rhizomes, demand by increasing the market. Beginning around this time, U.F. stationed an agent at South Ferry terminal in New York, where the Ellis Island