The Fish That Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King

by Rich Cohen

Zemurray, who defeated the jungle with the sweat of a hundred thousand workers, amassing a great fortune and empire in the process, was, in part, undone by forty-two lines of poetry. If I exaggerate, it’s only a little. In these years, a new Central American narrative was being written, a new foundational myth. United Fruit was going to be the devil in this narrative, the snake in the Garden. Zemurray understood this at some level and tried desperately to forge a new corporate identity. Hence all the money for universities and hospitals. But it was too late. By 1953, when Guevara started his bike and headed north to Guatemala, the basic outlines had been written. “I had the opportunity to pass through the dominions of the United Fruit,” Guevara wrote in his diary, “convincing me once again of just how terrible the capitalistic octopuses are. I have sworn before a picture of the old [and mourned] comrade Stalin that I won’t rest until I see these capitalist octopuses annihilated. In Guatemala, I will perfect myself and achieve what I need to be an authentic revolutionary.”