How the US Stole Central America (With Bananas)

- [Man] The American nation can not, must now, and will not, from empty establishment, form another communist government. - This is called a Cavendish banana. It's the most common banana on earth. It's probably the one that you have in your kitchen right now. It's definitely the one you see in the grocery store. This banana was created in a fancy looking house in England. Yes, created and yes, in England. Kind of weird, bananas aren't from England. They're originally from Asia and there are thousands of different kinds of bananas. So how did this banana, the Cavendish that

was created in England become the banana that you eat today? Well, the answer to that is not so simple. You have to understand the story of bananas, which yes, is something we're diving into today. It's a story filled with predatory corporations and geopolitics and American imperialism and disease, and really some amazing marketing. It explains how corporations can grow so big that they begin to act like governments, like dictators. And it explains why this banana, the Cavendish, the one you know and love, might not exist soon. - [Woman] The world's most popular banana may be on

the verge of extinction. Oh, and while I was diving deep into this, I discovered that there's a better tasting banana out there. One that isn't supposed to exist anymore, but I got my hands on some and yes, they're better. So buckle up. This is the F'd up history of bananas. We're pausing this story really quick because I just need to thank the sponsor of today's video, which is stamps.com, a service that I have used for now several years, long before they came to sponsor a video. So it's kind of cool. A few years ago, I

became independent, which meant I had to start running my own business. I quickly realized that running a business means shipping things a lot. I was shipping hard drives with footage. I was shipping gear and lenses. I was going to the post office a bunch, which is kind of my nightmare. So I Googled like what's the best way to not go to the post office and stamps.com came up, stamps.com is all of the things that the post office does, but in your office or house. I can ship packages and letters for less cost from the comfort

of this studio. In fact, right behind me is my whole stamps.com set up, got a fancy scale. So I literally put the package on this scale. It tells me how much it is. It plugs into my computer and I type in the address of where I'm sending it. And it spits out a shipping label that I then print with my label printer and I put it on the package. And then I put it at my front door and it gets taken away by the mail person. It's the easiest thing in the world. And I'm very

grateful that I discovered it, stamps.com is saving lots of businesses time and money. It has certainly saved me a lot of time and money, which is why I'm really grateful that they're supporting this channel and sponsoring today's video. You can get four weeks of this for free if you want to just try it out. There's a link in my description, stamps.com/johnnyharris. If you sign up, you'll get this free trial, plus some free postage and a digital scale. You'll get one of those scales, which is incredibly helpful. There's no long-term commitment or contracts. Just go to

stamps.com/johnnyharris to start your trial, get a free scale and some postage and never have to go to the post office again. So bananas are from Southeast Asia, but like 400 years ago, Europeans were taking over the world and the Portuguese brought bananas over to the Americas. A few hundred years later, an American sailor was in Jamaica and he found this funny looking exotic yellow fruit and money started flashing in his eyes. He started selling bananas to Americans who quickly loved this new fruit. Bananas were trending. People were talking about it. So then fast forward to

nearly the end of the 1800s. And you have the World's Fair, where all the people show up and show off their new technology. At the fair you've got this guy, Alexander Graham bell, who's showing up with his cute little new invention that's about to change the world. But another crowd favorite at the expo was the banana. Yes, bananas were equally as impressive as the telephone at the World's Fair. The banana business started booming in the United States. Much of these bananas flowing in from New York City. The port there was dubbed Banana Docks for a

while because of so much fruit import. So now you have all these Americans eating the sweet, creamy, delicious fruit, and throwing the slippery peels onto the street. It got so bad that the police commissioner at the time, oh God, I can't get away from this guy. Teddy Roosevelt once again. I swear I get into any story, I like to start to research it. And it's like, yeah. And then there's an American imperialism. And Teddy Roosevelt shows up. Anyway, so Teddy Roosevelt, the police commissioner starts putting a fine on people for throwing their banana peels on

the sidewalk. Like this isn't just like a silly, fake joke. It's like, this is a real thing. People slipped on banana peels. - Patrick, banana peel! - What did you say? (screams) - And you could go to jail for it. I mean, look at this. There's this New York Times article documenting Teddy Roosevelt, the police commissioner, speaking to a room of police captains, explaining quote, the bad habits of banana skins and dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement. This was a

real issue. Banana Docks, Teddy Roosevelt, slippery banana peels, silly newspaper articles from the late 1800s. This isn't the story here. We're just getting started. This is banana's innocent phase. It's about to heat up. Let's see how bananas turned from this to this. (upbeat music) The banana business people in the US realized it was time to ramp up to meet all of this new demand. But instead of just importing more bananas from say Jamaica or other countries in the Caribbean, the banana companies realized that they needed to control the supply chain. Let me explain what I

mean by second, by looking at this banana. Bananas are fragile. They're soft. They spoil in like a week, but this one's like moments away from spoiling. Look at those spots. To get this thing from somewhere close to the equator all the way to New York City and then into someone's market and then into somebody's home all without it being crushed and without it spoiling is a fragile, quick, expensive process. And the only way to do it profitably is to do a lot of it. A lot of bananas. (upbeat music) And the only way to do

a lot of bananas is to control the supply chain. So it's like 1900 at this point, there's a banana gold rush happening. And there's a bunch of companies trying to figure out how to control the supply chain. And then they decided to sort of merge together and become this one super company called the United Fruit Company. And their plan for combining was to control everything, control the supply chain. They turned their attention completely to Central America where they know bananas could grow abundantly, and where, oh, look at this. The US is thinking about making a

little canal that cuts through this little narrow strip of land. So the United Fruit Company is like, that's kind of a nice perk for the region. If anything goes wrong, the US could have our backs. Foreshadowing. Am I foreshadowing? I'm foreshadowing. So yeah, United Fruit Company is like, this region, central America , looks like a great neighborhood to control the supply chain. They wanted to control the people who worked on the farm by owning their basic survival needs. They wanted to control the houses they lived in and the stores they shopped in and what they

could buy. They wanted to control the transportation by building railways so that they could quickly ship their product onto ports. They wanted to control the boats and the waterways so that they could get all of these bananas from Central America to the US before they spoiled. They started with Guatemala, pouring tons of investment into controlling every inch of their supply chain. Soon, they were the largest company in Guatemala. They owned a fifth of the farmable land in the country. They owned all of the railways and all of the radio stations and radio infrastructure. And by

1901, the government of Guatemala actually hired the United Fruit Company to manage the country's postal service. What? United Fruit was starting to look a lot like a government. And the result was a lot of happy banana eating Americans. So they kept going. They kept expanding their operations across Central America. So now with all of this beautiful infrastructure and trains and land, the next strategy for making bananas even more profitable was, you guessed it, paying the workers next to nothing. And paying them not with real money. (upbeat music) A lot of the times United Fruit paid

their workers in vouchers. These vouchers could only be used in designated United Fruit commissaries. So they're not actually making real money here. So wait, now the United fruit Company has its own currency? Oh, and they also had like a private Navy, 93 boats called the Great White Fleet. Then eventually they started using these boats to transport people on cruises. These boats were even used during World War II. United Fruit started to look like a literal government. They had their hands in everything so much so that they earned their self the nickname El Pulpo, which means

the octopus in Spanish, meaning they had their tentacles in everything all over Central America, the land, the crops, the people, the infrastructure, and soon enough government agencies. Soon these countries became so dominated by and reliant on the United Fruit Company that they were no longer run by the people or the governments. They were run by American banana companies who had all the power and leverage in the world. This led to the nickname Banana Republic, which is a politically unstable country whose society is exploited for profit for one single product, in this case bananas. And probably

not the best sort of thing to name your clothing store after, but just a thought, but like who made that decision? United Fruit and other banana companies continued to grow and control Central America. Eventually people got tired of this. In 1911, Honduras was like, all right, we're done, banana companies. We're going to take back our land. We can take it from here. These are our plantations. You've gone too far. Banana companies didn't like this. So they organized a private army to help overthrow the government so that they could put in a president that they liked

who would allow them to keep doing exactly what they were doing and also give them a tax break. So yeah, banana companies are now overthrowing governments. Jeez. This kept happening. Anytime there was political dissent or the governments of these countries started to step up and say no, the banana companies would intervene, and guess who had their back? The US military, and yes, we're back to Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt. What a guy. Here's Teddy stomping around the Caribbean with his big stick, making sure that American military and business interests are protected, in Honduras alone, the US

invaded seven times in the early 1900s, all in the name of protecting these banana companies and other US interests from having to face these pesky locals who were so audacious as to want to run their own country. How dare they? If you remember that at this time, the US was starting to get really comfortable with empire behavior and central America was at the top of the priority list. The banana companies knew this, which allowed them to feel emboldened, to just sort of do whatever they wanted in the region. But this is sort of child's play.

It started to get a lot worse in the 1920s. (upbeat music) There was a situation in Colombia where a bunch of workers for the United Fruit Company decided to stop working and protest their working conditions. They were asking for a few things like, I don't know, working six days a week instead of seven, or getting paid real money. The United Fruit Company refuses to negotiate with them. And instead goes to the US and says, hey, USA, we've got these really annoying workers who are trying to unionize and trying to get paid and stuff. And it

actually smells a lot like communism. And the US is like, wait, what, communism? Tell me more. So then the US threatens to invade with their Marines and squash this strike if the Colombian military doesn't do something first. Reminder that we're not talking about some big political revolution or rebellion. We're talking about a few workers in a banana plantation protesting for more humane conditions. And yet this was a priority for the US government to put pressure on Colombia to fix the situation. Of course, Columbia didn't want to make the US angry. So they responded and sent

in their own troops to go put down this workers' strike. And they were ordered to quote, spare no ammunition. So on December 5th, 1928, these protesters are in the town square in this town in Columbia. And the Colombian army shows up and massacres them. Men, women, and children were killed by their own military all because an American banana company didn't want to pay them a decent wage. I mean, this is madness. It is madness to think that these large geopolitical forces were coming to bear over a banana plantation. This event is called the Banana Massacre.

This didn't stop in 1928, fast forward to Guatemala in the 1950s. At this point, the United Fruit Company, El Pulpo, is making major profits. They own almost 50% of the land in Guatemala tax-free. But this president, Jacobo Arbenz, who was democratically elected is trying to change things. He wants to take land that United Fruit owns but isn't using and redistribute it to poor Guatemalans. He's sort of doing like a Robin Hood thing, trying to like lift poor Guatemalans out of poverty. But of course, United Fruit didn't like this, but instead of engaging directly with the

Guatemalan government, United Fruit goes to the white house and says those magic words again, communism. United Fruit then hired this PR magician who happened to be Sigmund Freud's nephew. And he worked with news agencies to create a bunch of fake stories that linked Arbenz, the president of Guatemala to communism, completely fake news. And not just like using that word lightly, like he created a fake Guatemalan newspaper, created all these fake reports and then distributed those fake newspapers to Congress. He planted the seeds in their minds that United Fruit Company were the good guys and that

Arbenz, the democratically elected leader, needed to go because of communism. It totally worked. President Eisenhower, the president of the United States believed all of this. And he sent in the CIA to get Arbenz out of power to protect the banana people once again. It's a classic CIA coup, they go find a bunch of rebels. They give them money and they train them. - [Radio Announcer] Rebels rose to oust Guatemala's red infiltrated government. - They find a leader who wants to be the next president that's friendly to the US and eventually they start broadcasting anti-government propaganda,

and they turn Guatemalans against their government with all of this fake news and propaganda. They send the Navy in to block Guatemalan waters. They send some bombs onto Guatemala city, and then they invade. (dramatic music) And then with these trained fighters, they go take over the government, the Guatemalan army surrenders, and the leader of the rebels becomes the new president friendly to the United States. And now the banana companies are happy and they have a guy in power that is their guy. It's like they have a playbook on how to mess with democracies around the

world. And they just sort of followed the playbook. They're like, oh, we've done this before. We're going to do it again in Iran in a little bit. This is classic CIA coup, by the way, this coup was sort of a death blow to democracy in Guatemala. It divided and destroyed the budding civil society that has not allowed Guatemala to recover since, all because these banana companies wanted to control the supply chain. These things leave scars, major scars, major marks on a country, scars that are still felt today. Let's switch gears for a second because all

of these banana coups and banana republics and massacres is like horrendous. But during all of this violence and military invasions and human rights violations, all of this meant that the United Fruit Company was getting really, really good at their business. They were sending too many bananas to the United States. There was a ton of bananas supplied, but demand wasn't rising fast enough. The average American didn't totally know how to use bananas. So the United Fruit Company creates this amazing marketing campaign. (upbeat music) So now they're paying doctors to write amazing academic journal articles about bananas.

They cut a deal with Kellogg's to market the cereal as something that pairs with bananas, which is something I still do today. I cut up my bananas and I put them in my cereal because of this campaign. They targeted moms with small children. They made recipe books. They even created a guide on how to decorate with bananas. - [TV Broadcaster] Bananas can to be served in many different and many attractive ways. Blended with fruits, nuts, and gelatin, they provide high food value with nourishment. - But their biggest success was Miss Chiquita. ♪ I'm Chiquita Banana

and I've come to say ♪ ♪ bananas have to ripen in a certain way. ♪ ♪ And when they're flecked with brown and have a golden hue ♪ ♪ Bananas taste the best and are the best for you. ♪ - The American public fell in love with this lady and bananas. They had no idea that these bananas that were being produced and shipped and bought with blood, they just liked how they taste. But isn't that the case with a lot of things that we all consume every day. But there's one thing that US imperialism and

millions of dollars of marketing cannot control, which is disease. This is the part of the story that I tell you that the bananas that were all the rage during the 1900s are not the bananas that you're eating today. (upbeat music) Part of United Fruit Company's efforts to control everything was standardizing the genetics of the banana, making them all exactly the same. Monocultures is what we call that. The problem with monocultures is that they are heaven for a disease because you don't have to solve the same puzzle to infect another banana. If you infect one, you

infect them all. And that's exactly what happened. Panama disease was a fungus that came in and destroyed banana plantations. The banana supply in the US shrank rapidly. And there was even a hit song about the banana shortage. ♪ We have no bananas today ♪ The banana that they had been using, the one that was getting really popular in the US was called the Gros Michel, or the Big Mike banana, but it was now completely getting ravaged by disease. So these banana companies are freaking out. They're like, we are done, we've built this entire empire and

this disease is going to wipe us out. So they started to scramble to find another banana. It turns out there's like a thousand types of bananas out there. There's red ones and blue ones and teal ones. I mean, a blue banana. I feel like I have to eat a blue banana at some point in my life, but here's the problem. Us Americans, we buy our food kind of with our eyes first. We're just like, it needs to look good. And so these companies realized they couldn't send a blue banana to the United States. They needed

a banana that looked similar, yellow, sweet and seedless so that they could keep selling to Americans who hopefully wouldn't notice the switch. Enter our friend, the Cavendish banana ♪ God save the precious queen ♪ Like I said at the beginning, this banana was invented by a British guy who was tinkering with banana seeds in this amazing looking house in Northern England. And after years of playing around with the genetics, the plant finally flowered and popped out this big, beautiful yellow banana. And so he named it after the Duke William Cavendish. So now here's the sad

part. The Gros Michel, the one that had caught on that was like the big hit in America was a way better banana, is a way better banana. It is sweeter. It's more durable and it's just overall a better banana compared to the Cavendish. In fact, the artificial banana flavor that we have in our candies, like Laffy Taffy comes from the original Gros Michel, not from the Cavendish, but the Gros Michel was getting destroyed by this disease. And the Cavendish was luckily resistant to the disease. So the dictator banana companies made the switch and hoped that

the people wouldn't care or notice as long as they looked the same. And guess what? It totally worked. They quietly switched out the banana to the new Cavendish and people just kept buying bananas. I mean, I can't believe that there is a better banana out there that I have not tasted. I wonder if I can get my hands on one. (upbeat music) The Gros Michel banana still exists. It's just a select few people on this planet still grow it. And I found a farm that sent me a few. I'm going to try this thing. Gros

Michel. Let's do this Beautiful banana. Wow. I'm obviously primed to like this more so I don't know if I'm really liking it more, but it's definitely a better banana right now in my mind. Slightly different color. It's got this like burgundy vibe going on. It's sweeter. I like the texture more. I think this is a better banana. Too bad this thing got completely wiped out by a disease. So let's get up to speed before we finish the story off, because the last part of it is quite interesting and applies to our modern day. To summarize,

came to the US, predatory companies invaded whole countries to help the US exploit them for bananas while using amazing marketing to keep demand up. And because of this Panama Disease, they had to switch to the inferior Cavendish banana. So where do we go from here? United fruit eventually rebranded to Chiquita. They're still doing some pretty shady stuff like paying millions of dollars to terrorist death squads and getting sued by workers who've become sterile after handling pesticides. Banana companies will probably always do this. Because the other thing that remains is that bananas are still soft and

spoil quickly and grow in far away places from where you eat them. So the entire supply chain needs to be controlled. And the other thing that hasn't changed is that the new banana is genetically optimized so that every banana is exactly the same. So it fits perfectly into these boxes, into these crates, onto these ships, into these supermarkets. But guess what? There's another disease. The Panama disease, the one that wiped out the Gros Michel, it's back and it's mutated, and it's coming for the Cavendish. And what's tricky about these diseases is there's no way to

detect them before they arrive before it's too late. It just quietly kills the banana trees and makes it impossible to ever grow there again, you have to burn the entire plantation. This is already happening in the Philippines, which is the second largest exporter of bananas, the disease has devastated the land and the banana economy. It's making its way through Asia. But Asia is super far away and it's like, there's a whole ocean in between. All our bananas come from Latin America. Wrong. In 2019, it was detected in Colombia. And in April of this year, just

a few months ago, the disease was found in Peru, right next to Ecuador, which is the largest exports of bananas that come to the US. It's coming for your bananas. So everyone's on high alert and bananas as we know them might be doomed. So now we're seeing history kind of repeat itself. We're looking at the potential collapse of a $25 billion industry and entire economies, which is like hundreds of thousands of jobs. (dramatic music) To me, the big problem here, the thing that's repeating itself is the same problem of United Fruit Company going in and

trying to control every angle of their production to maximize profits. When we have companies that feel emboldened to do whatever it takes to make the most profit, you're going to get situations like this, whether it is banana massacres in Columbia or a coup in Honduras or a monoculture that gets wiped out by disease time and time again, we try to engineer our way out of these problems and we sometimes do, but at the end of the day, nature will catch up with us. And as long as we ignore the true cost of these economies, the

cost to people, to democracies, to ecologies, we're never actually going to get rid of these problems. Thanks for watching. I'm going to eat a Cavendish now. See you. - [Man] The American nation can not, must now, and will not, from empty establishment, form another communist government. - This is called a Cavendish banana. It's the most common banana on earth. It's probably the one that you have in your kitchen right now. It's definitely the one you see in the grocery store. This banana was created in a fancy looking house in England. Yes, created and yes, in

England. Kind of weird, bananas aren't from England. They're originally from Asia and there are thousands of different kinds of bananas. So how did this banana, the Cavendish that was created in England become the banana that you eat today? Well, the answer to that is not so simple. You have to understand the story of bananas, which yes, is something we're diving into today. It's a story filled with predatory corporations and geopolitics and American imperialism and disease, and really some amazing marketing. It explains how corporations can grow so big that they begin to act like governments, like

dictators. And it explains why this banana, the Cavendish, the one you know and love, might not exist soon. - [Woman] The world's most popular banana may be on the verge of extinction. Oh, and while I was diving deep into this, I discovered that there's a better tasting banana out there. One that isn't supposed to exist anymore, but I got my hands on some and yes, they're better. So buckle up. This is the F'd up history of bananas. We're pausing this story really quick because I just need to thank the sponsor of today's video, which is

stamps.com, a service that I have used for now several years, long before they came to sponsor a video. So it's kind of cool. A few years ago, I became independent, which meant I had to start running my own business. I quickly realized that running a business means shipping things a lot. I was shipping hard drives with footage. I was shipping gear and lenses. I was going to the post office a bunch, which is kind of my nightmare. So I Googled like what's the best way to not go to the post office and stamps.com came up,

stamps.com is all of the things that the post office does, but in your office or house. I can ship packages and letters for less cost from the comfort of this studio. In fact, right behind me is my whole stamps.com set up, got a fancy scale. So I literally put the package on this scale. It tells me how much it is. It plugs into my computer and I type in the address of where I'm sending it. And it spits out a shipping label that I then print with my label printer and I put it on the

package. And then I put it at my front door and it gets taken away by the mail person. It's the easiest thing in the world. And I'm very grateful that I discovered it, stamps.com is saving lots of businesses time and money. It has certainly saved me a lot of time and money, which is why I'm really grateful that they're supporting this channel and sponsoring today's video. You can get four weeks of this for free if you want to just try it out. There's a link in my description, stamps.com/johnnyharris. If you sign up, you'll get this

free trial, plus some free postage and a digital scale. You'll get one of those scales, which is incredibly helpful. There's no long-term commitment or contracts. Just go to stamps.com/johnnyharris to start your trial, get a free scale and some postage and never have to go to the post office again. So bananas are from Southeast Asia, but like 400 years ago, Europeans were taking over the world and the Portuguese brought bananas over to the Americas. A few hundred years later, an American sailor was in Jamaica and he found this funny looking exotic yellow fruit and money started

flashing in his eyes. He started selling bananas to Americans who quickly loved this new fruit. Bananas were trending. People were talking about it. So then fast forward to nearly the end of the 1800s. And you have the World's Fair, where all the people show up and show off their new technology. At the fair you've got this guy, Alexander Graham bell, who's showing up with his cute little new invention that's about to change the world. But another crowd favorite at the expo was the banana. Yes, bananas were equally as impressive as the telephone at the World's

Fair. The banana business started booming in the United States. Much of these bananas flowing in from New York City. The port there was dubbed Banana Docks for a while because of so much fruit import. So now you have all these Americans eating the sweet, creamy, delicious fruit, and throwing the slippery peels onto the street. It got so bad that the police commissioner at the time, oh God, I can't get away from this guy. Teddy Roosevelt once again. I swear I get into any story, I like to start to research it. And it's like, yeah. And

then there's an American imperialism. And Teddy Roosevelt shows up. Anyway, so Teddy Roosevelt, the police commissioner starts putting a fine on people for throwing their banana peels on the sidewalk. Like this isn't just like a silly, fake joke. It's like, this is a real thing. People slipped on banana peels. - Patrick, banana peel! - What did you say? (screams) - And you could go to jail for it. I mean, look at this. There's this New York Times article documenting Teddy Roosevelt, the police commissioner, speaking to a room of police captains, explaining quote, the bad habits

of banana skins and dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air and bring them down with terrific force on the hard pavement. This was a real issue. Banana Docks, Teddy Roosevelt, slippery banana peels, silly newspaper articles from the late 1800s. This isn't the story here. We're just getting started. This is banana's innocent phase. It's about to heat up. Let's see how bananas turned from this to this. (upbeat music) The banana business people in the US realized it was time to ramp up to meet all of this new demand. But instead of just

importing more bananas from say Jamaica or other countries in the Caribbean, the banana companies realized that they needed to control the supply chain. Let me explain what I mean by second, by looking at this banana. Bananas are fragile. They're soft. They spoil in like a week, but this one's like moments away from spoiling. Look at those spots. To get this thing from somewhere close to the equator all the way to New York City and then into someone's market and then into somebody's home all without it being crushed and without it spoiling is a fragile, quick,

expensive process. And the only way to do it profitably is to do a lot of it. A lot of bananas. (upbeat music) And the only way to do a lot of bananas is to control the supply chain. So it's like 1900 at this point, there's a banana gold rush happening. And there's a bunch of companies trying to figure out how to control the supply chain. And then they decided to sort of merge together and become this one super company called the United Fruit Company. And their plan for combining was to control everything, control the supply

chain. They turned their attention completely to Central America where they know bananas could grow abundantly, and where, oh, look at this. The US is thinking about making a little canal that cuts through this little narrow strip of land. So the United Fruit Company is like, that's kind of a nice perk for the region. If anything goes wrong, the US could have our backs. Foreshadowing. Am I foreshadowing? I'm foreshadowing. So yeah, United Fruit Company is like, this region, central America , looks like a great neighborhood to control the supply chain. They wanted to control the people

who worked on the farm by owning their basic survival needs. They wanted to control the houses they lived in and the stores they shopped in and what they could buy. They wanted to control the transportation by building railways so that they could quickly ship their product onto ports. They wanted to control the boats and the waterways so that they could get all of these bananas from Central America to the US before they spoiled. They started with Guatemala, pouring tons of investment into controlling every inch of their supply chain. Soon, they were the largest company in

Guatemala. They owned a fifth of the farmable land in the country. They owned all of the railways and all of the radio stations and radio infrastructure. And by 1901, the government of Guatemala actually hired the United Fruit Company to manage the country's postal service. What? United Fruit was starting to look a lot like a government. And the result was a lot of happy banana eating Americans. So they kept going. They kept expanding their operations across Central America. So now with all of this beautiful infrastructure and trains and land, the next strategy for making bananas even

more profitable was, you guessed it, paying the workers next to nothing. And paying them not with real money. (upbeat music) A lot of the times United Fruit paid their workers in vouchers. These vouchers could only be used in designated United Fruit commissaries. So they're not actually making real money here. So wait, now the United fruit Company has its own currency? Oh, and they also had like a private Navy, 93 boats called the Great White Fleet. Then eventually they started using these boats to transport people on cruises. These boats were even used during World War II.

United Fruit started to look like a literal government. They had their hands in everything so much so that they earned their self the nickname El Pulpo, which means the octopus in Spanish, meaning they had their tentacles in everything all over Central America, the land, the crops, the people, the infrastructure, and soon enough government agencies. Soon these countries became so dominated by and reliant on the United Fruit Company that they were no longer run by the people or the governments. They were run by American banana companies who had all the power and leverage in the world.

This led to the nickname Banana Republic, which is a politically unstable country whose society is exploited for profit for one single product, in this case bananas. And probably not the best sort of thing to name your clothing store after, but just a thought, but like who made that decision? United Fruit and other banana companies continued to grow and control Central America. Eventually people got tired of this. In 1911, Honduras was like, all right, we're done, banana companies. We're going to take back our land. We can take it from here. These are our plantations. You've gone

too far. Banana companies didn't like this. So they organized a private army to help overthrow the government so that they could put in a president that they liked who would allow them to keep doing exactly what they were doing and also give them a tax break. So yeah, banana companies are now overthrowing governments. Jeez. This kept happening. Anytime there was political dissent or the governments of these countries started to step up and say no, the banana companies would intervene, and guess who had their back? The US military, and yes, we're back to Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy

Roosevelt. What a guy. Here's Teddy stomping around the Caribbean with his big stick, making sure that American military and business interests are protected, in Honduras alone, the US invaded seven times in the early 1900s, all in the name of protecting these banana companies and other US interests from having to face these pesky locals who were so audacious as to want to run their own country. How dare they? If you remember that at this time, the US was starting to get really comfortable with empire behavior and central America was at the top of the priority list.

The banana companies knew this, which allowed them to feel emboldened, to just sort of do whatever they wanted in the region. But this is sort of child's play. It started to get a lot worse in the 1920s. (upbeat music) There was a situation in Colombia where a bunch of workers for the United Fruit Company decided to stop working and protest their working conditions. They were asking for a few things like, I don't know, working six days a week instead of seven, or getting paid real money. The United Fruit Company refuses to negotiate with them. And

instead goes to the US and says, hey, USA, we've got these really annoying workers who are trying to unionize and trying to get paid and stuff. And it actually smells a lot like communism. And the US is like, wait, what, communism? Tell me more. So then the US threatens to invade with their Marines and squash this strike if the Colombian military doesn't do something first. Reminder that we're not talking about some big political revolution or rebellion. We're talking about a few workers in a banana plantation protesting for more humane conditions. And yet this was a

priority for the US government to put pressure on Colombia to fix the situation. Of course, Columbia didn't want to make the US angry. So they responded and sent in their own troops to go put down this workers' strike. And they were ordered to quote, spare no ammunition. So on December 5th, 1928, these protesters are in the town square in this town in Columbia. And the Colombian army shows up and massacres them. Men, women, and children were killed by their own military all because an American banana company didn't want to pay them a decent wage. I

mean, this is madness. It is madness to think that these large geopolitical forces were coming to bear over a banana plantation. This event is called the Banana Massacre. This didn't stop in 1928, fast forward to Guatemala in the 1950s. At this point, the United Fruit Company, El Pulpo, is making major profits. They own almost 50% of the land in Guatemala tax-free. But this president, Jacobo Arbenz, who was democratically elected is trying to change things. He wants to take land that United Fruit owns but isn't using and redistribute it to poor Guatemalans. He's sort of doing

like a Robin Hood thing, trying to like lift poor Guatemalans out of poverty. But of course, United Fruit didn't like this, but instead of engaging directly with the Guatemalan government, United Fruit goes to the white house and says those magic words again, communism. United Fruit then hired this PR magician who happened to be Sigmund Freud's nephew. And he worked with news agencies to create a bunch of fake stories that linked Arbenz, the president of Guatemala to communism, completely fake news. And not just like using that word lightly, like he created a fake Guatemalan newspaper, created

all these fake reports and then distributed those fake newspapers to Congress. He planted the seeds in their minds that United Fruit Company were the good guys and that Arbenz, the democratically elected leader, needed to go because of communism. It totally worked. President Eisenhower, the president of the United States believed all of this. And he sent in the CIA to get Arbenz out of power to protect the banana people once again. It's a classic CIA coup, they go find a bunch of rebels. They give them money and they train them. - [Radio Announcer] Rebels rose to

oust Guatemala's red infiltrated government. - They find a leader who wants to be the next president that's friendly to the US and eventually they start broadcasting anti-government propaganda, and they turn Guatemalans against their government with all of this fake news and propaganda. They send the Navy in to block Guatemalan waters. They send some bombs onto Guatemala city, and then they invade. (dramatic music) And then with these trained fighters, they go take over the government, the Guatemalan army surrenders, and the leader of the rebels becomes the new president friendly to the United States. And now the

banana companies are happy and they have a guy in power that is their guy. It's like they have a playbook on how to mess with democracies around the world. And they just sort of followed the playbook. They're like, oh, we've done this before. We're going to do it again in Iran in a little bit. This is classic CIA coup, by the way, this coup was sort of a death blow to democracy in Guatemala. It divided and destroyed the budding civil society that has not allowed Guatemala to recover since, all because these banana companies wanted to

control the supply chain. These things leave scars, major scars, major marks on a country, scars that are still felt today. Let's switch gears for a second because all of these banana coups and banana republics and massacres is like horrendous. But during all of this violence and military invasions and human rights violations, all of this meant that the United Fruit Company was getting really, really good at their business. They were sending too many bananas to the United States. There was a ton of bananas supplied, but demand wasn't rising fast enough. The average American didn't totally know

how to use bananas. So the United Fruit Company creates this amazing marketing campaign. (upbeat music) So now they're paying doctors to write amazing academic journal articles about bananas. They cut a deal with Kellogg's to market the cereal as something that pairs with bananas, which is something I still do today. I cut up my bananas and I put them in my cereal because of this campaign. They targeted moms with small children. They made recipe books. They even created a guide on how to decorate with bananas. - [TV Broadcaster] Bananas can to be served in many different

and many attractive ways. Blended with fruits, nuts, and gelatin, they provide high food value with nourishment. - But their biggest success was Miss Chiquita. ♪ I'm Chiquita Banana and I've come to say ♪ ♪ bananas have to ripen in a certain way. ♪ ♪ And when they're flecked with brown and have a golden hue ♪ ♪ Bananas taste the best and are the best for you. ♪ - The American public fell in love with this lady and bananas. They had no idea that these bananas that were being produced and shipped and bought with blood, they

just liked how they taste. But isn't that the case with a lot of things that we all consume every day. But there's one thing that US imperialism and millions of dollars of marketing cannot control, which is disease. This is the part of the story that I tell you that the bananas that were all the rage during the 1900s are not the bananas that you're eating today. (upbeat music) Part of United Fruit Company's efforts to control everything was standardizing the genetics of the banana, making them all exactly the same. Monocultures is what we call that. The

problem with monocultures is that they are heaven for a disease because you don't have to solve the same puzzle to infect another banana. If you infect one, you infect them all. And that's exactly what happened. Panama disease was a fungus that came in and destroyed banana plantations. The banana supply in the US shrank rapidly. And there was even a hit song about the banana shortage. ♪ We have no bananas today ♪ The banana that they had been using, the one that was getting really popular in the US was called the Gros Michel, or the Big

Mike banana, but it was now completely getting ravaged by disease. So these banana companies are freaking out. They're like, we are done, we've built this entire empire and this disease is going to wipe us out. So they started to scramble to find another banana. It turns out there's like a thousand types of bananas out there. There's red ones and blue ones and teal ones. I mean, a blue banana. I feel like I have to eat a blue banana at some point in my life, but here's the problem. Us Americans, we buy our food kind of

with our eyes first. We're just like, it needs to look good. And so these companies realized they couldn't send a blue banana to the United States. They needed a banana that looked similar, yellow, sweet and seedless so that they could keep selling to Americans who hopefully wouldn't notice the switch. Enter our friend, the Cavendish banana ♪ God save the precious queen ♪ Like I said at the beginning, this banana was invented by a British guy who was tinkering with banana seeds in this amazing looking house in Northern England. And after years of playing around with

the genetics, the plant finally flowered and popped out this big, beautiful yellow banana. And so he named it after the Duke William Cavendish. So now here's the sad part. The Gros Michel, the one that had caught on that was like the big hit in America was a way better banana, is a way better banana. It is sweeter. It's more durable and it's just overall a better banana compared to the Cavendish. In fact, the artificial banana flavor that we have in our candies, like Laffy Taffy comes from the original Gros Michel, not from the Cavendish, but

the Gros Michel was getting destroyed by this disease. And the Cavendish was luckily resistant to the disease. So the dictator banana companies made the switch and hoped that the people wouldn't care or notice as long as they looked the same. And guess what? It totally worked. They quietly switched out the banana to the new Cavendish and people just kept buying bananas. I mean, I can't believe that there is a better banana out there that I have not tasted. I wonder if I can get my hands on one. (upbeat music) The Gros Michel banana still exists.

It's just a select few people on this planet still grow it. And I found a farm that sent me a few. I'm going to try this thing. Gros Michel. Let's do this Beautiful banana. Wow. I'm obviously primed to like this more so I don't know if I'm really liking it more, but it's definitely a better banana right now in my mind. Slightly different color. It's got this like burgundy vibe going on. It's sweeter. I like the texture more. I think this is a better banana. Too bad this thing got completely wiped out by a disease.

So let's get up to speed before we finish the story off, because the last part of it is quite interesting and applies to our modern day. To summarize, came to the US, predatory companies invaded whole countries to help the US exploit them for bananas while using amazing marketing to keep demand up. And because of this Panama Disease, they had to switch to the inferior Cavendish banana. So where do we go from here? United fruit eventually rebranded to Chiquita. They're still doing some pretty shady stuff like paying millions of dollars to terrorist death squads and getting

sued by workers who've become sterile after handling pesticides. Banana companies will probably always do this. Because the other thing that remains is that bananas are still soft and spoil quickly and grow in far away places from where you eat them. So the entire supply chain needs to be controlled. And the other thing that hasn't changed is that the new banana is genetically optimized so that every banana is exactly the same. So it fits perfectly into these boxes, into these crates, onto these ships, into these supermarkets. But guess what? There's another disease. The Panama disease, the

one that wiped out the Gros Michel, it's back and it's mutated, and it's coming for the Cavendish. And what's tricky about these diseases is there's no way to detect them before they arrive before it's too late. It just quietly kills the banana trees and makes it impossible to ever grow there again, you have to burn the entire plantation. This is already happening in the Philippines, which is the second largest exporter of bananas, the disease has devastated the land and the banana economy. It's making its way through Asia. But Asia is super far away and it's

like, there's a whole ocean in between. All our bananas come from Latin America. Wrong. In 2019, it was detected in Colombia. And in April of this year, just a few months ago, the disease was found in Peru, right next to Ecuador, which is the largest exports of bananas that come to the US. It's coming for your bananas. So everyone's on high alert and bananas as we know them might be doomed. So now we're seeing history kind of repeat itself. We're looking at the potential collapse of a $25 billion industry and entire economies, which is like

hundreds of thousands of jobs. (dramatic music) To me, the big problem here, the thing that's repeating itself is the same problem of United Fruit Company going in and trying to control every angle of their production to maximize profits. When we have companies that feel emboldened to do whatever it takes to make the most profit, you're going to get situations like this, whether it is banana massacres in Columbia or a coup in Honduras or a monoculture that gets wiped out by disease time and time again, we try to engineer our way out of these problems and

we sometimes do, but at the end of the day, nature will catch up with us. And as long as we ignore the true cost of these economies, the cost to people, to democracies, to ecologies, we're never actually going to get rid of these problems. Thanks for watching. I'm going to eat a Cavendish now. See you.