The Fifties

by David Halberstam

suggested that Guatemala’s truck drivers, who were often on the road for three days at a time, receive some traveling expenses, Ubico screamed at him, “So! You too are a Communist!” On another occasion he accused Ydigoras of reading Communist literature: When the latter protested that he had been reading a papal encyclical and showed it to Ubico, Ubico skimmed it and said, “Then it’s true! There was a Communist Pope!” When conservative American political advisers suggested to Sam Zemurray, United Fruit’s head (Sam the Banana Man was the nickname he had gotten as a poor boy working the New Orleans port when he had managed to corner the banana market), that the company’s repressive policies put it on some sort of political collision course with its poorest workers, he waved them aside. Political revolution was no problem, he liked to say; the peasants were too ignorant. In 1944 the country’s fledgling middle class had revolted and brought back from exile the popular Juan Jose Arevalo Bermejo, a schoolteacher and writer who had been living in self-imposed exile for almost a decade because of his open opposition to Ubico. He was a true democrat, with a passionate belief that economic progress came through the political participation of ordinary people; his heroes were Bolivar, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. Arevalo was, as Richard Immerman, the historian, noted, almost too idealistic, a kind of latter-day Don Quixote, yet