United Fruit Company

United Fruit Company
House flag
Industry	Agriculture
Founded	March 30, 1899
Predecessors	Boston Fruit Company Tropical Trading & Transport
Defunct	June 30, 1970 (as United Fruit Company) August, 1984 (as United Brands)
Successors	Chiquita Brands International

The United Fruit Company, later the United Brands Company was a Statesian corporation that traded in tropical fruit and held a virtual monopoly on bananas. The company was deeply involved in U.S. imperialism and was responsible for neocolonialism in Central America. It had close connections to U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA directors Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and various members of Congress and the State Department. In 1990, the company's name changed to Chiquita Brands International.

A photo from a 1921 publication by the United Fruit Company showing workers loading bananas into railway cars.

By 1954, the network of connections had grown so extensive it was hard to tell where the government ended and the company began. John Moors Cabot, the American assistant secretary of state in charge of Guatemala, was the brother of Thomas Cabot, who had been the president of United Fruit. John Foster Dulles, who represented United Fruit while he was a law partner at Sullivan & Cromwell—he negotiated that crucial U.F. deal with Guatemalan officials in the 1930s—was secretary of state under Eisenhower; his brother Allen, who did legal work for the company and sat on its board of directors, was the head of the CIA under Eisenhower; Henry Cabot Lodge, who was America’s ambassador to the UN, was a large owner of United Fruit stock; Ed Whitman, the United Fruit PR man, was married to Ann Whitman, Dwight Eisenhower’s personal secretary. You could not see these connections until you could—then you could not stop seeing them. Where did the interest of United Fruit end and the interest of the United States begin? It was impossible to tell.

— Rich Cohen, The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America's Banana King, Chapter 18, "Operation Success"

History

An image showing routes of the "Great White Fleet" of ships of the United Fruit Company which transported the company's products as well as passengers.

The United Fruit Company was founded in 1899 with the merger of the Boston Fruit Company owned by Lorenzo Dow Baker and Andrew Preston, and the railroad company of Minor C. Keith, who planted bananas along his company's railways.

By 1905, United Fruit controlled land in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras.

By 1921, United Fruit's "Tropical Divisions" operated in Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, Panama and the Canary Islands. Its US-based divisions included activity in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Mobile and Galveston.

The company described some of its assets in 1921, writing:

[The United Fruit Company] owns 1,505,000 acres of land, of which over 350,000 are cultivated. In addition, it leases 124,000 acres of land, of which 27,500 are cultivated. It operates 1,200 miles of railroad and over 3,500 miles of telephone and telegraph lines. It owns and operates in Jamaica two of the finest and most modern hotels in conjunction with its passenger business. It owns 32,500 head of cattle and 8,000 horses and mules. [...] [The company's] steamships furnish regular passenger, mail and freight service between the Atlantic ports of the United States and Cuba, Jamaica and the Atlantic ports of Central America and Colombia, and, through the connecting lines at the Panama Canal, with the west coast ports of South America. In other words, the “Great White Fleet” directly serves nine countries of the Western Hemisphere and is a prime factor in the commerce of twenty-three nations of that hemisphere. During the past ten years its fleet has carried 560,000 passengers and moved 13,960,000 tons of freight. It ordinarily uses about ninety steamships in connection with its business (including its chartered steamers and English fleet). Of the twenty-nine steamships owned by the Company and now in service, nineteen are refrigerator banana cargo and passenger ships, eight are refrigerator banana cargo ships, one is a non-refrigerator banana cargo ship, and one is an oil tanker.

The company also claimed to have rendered what it called the "fever-ridden swamps and jungles" of Central America and the Atlantic coast into "modern, sanitary and healthy communities", crediting itself with this due to its installation and maintenance of waterworks, sewerage systems and electric light plants in various locations.

United Fruit made company towns and paid workers in scrip to be used at the company store.

Samuel Zemurray, founder of the Cuyamel Fruit Company, ran the United Fruit Company from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s.

The Union of Banana Exporting Countries (UPEB) was formed in 1974.

In 1975, then-chairman of United Brands, Eli M. Black, fell to his death from his office on the 44th floor of the Pan Am building in New York City, with his death deemed a suicide.

In 1990, the company's name was changed to Chiquita Brands International, basing the name on the long time mascot of United Fruit and United Brands.

Operations by country

Guatemala

The United Fruit Company had a monopoly over bananas in Guatemala and controlled the country's telephones, telegraphs, railroads, and its only Atlantic port. In the early 1950s, President Jacobo Árbenz expropriated much of its land. He offered the company compensation, but the value was based on what it paid in taxes and was about 1/30th of what it was really worth. In March 1953, the company gave right-wing military officers $64,000 to fund a CIA-backed uprising against Árbenz. After the 1954 coup against Árbenz, the company regained all the land it lost in the land reform and banned banana workers' unions.