Historians have waited a long time for an adequate history of the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica. Lack of access to company documents, scholars’ belief in the centrality of coffee as opposed to the marginality of bananas in explaining the evolution of Costa Rica’s political process, and the extremely controversial nature of a dominant, foreign enterprise in a small country have hindered the reconstruction of the history of Costa Rica’s banana industry. Aviva Chomsky’s book is a significant advance in filling the void and, while it does not put controversy to rest, it will stimulate others to continue the effort.
This book makes many contributions. Through excellent use of newspapers, Costa Rican government documents, travel accounts, foreign consular reports, and a few United Fruit Company materials, Chomsky illuminates the lives of West Indian workers and certain aspects of company policy. Mortality and morbidity statistics from company hospitals reveal, not surprisingly, the company’s greater concern for the health of managers than that of workers, and its determination to subordinate medical policy to business decisions. The analysis of the role of British customs, by way of Jamaica, and African religious beliefs in the formation of worker solidarity against company policy is another major contribution.
The book’s description of the workers’ collective action, especially the strike of 1910, revises Costa Rican labor history, which generally has ignored the early union activity of Jamaican workers on the Atlantic Coast while crediting Central Valley workers for initiating labor organization in the 1920s. Another valuable section is the explanation of the company’s reliance on independent producers rather than on company farms for banana supply. Because the company controlled prices and transportation, this strategy transferred risk to those least able to bear it and simultaneously increased the company’s profit.
Teachers looking for a controversial case study of a transnational corporation in Latin America might well be attracted to this book. It is scholarly without diminishing readability. It does have some negative aspects, however. Chomsky’s comparison of banana plantation workers’ lives with those of slaves on West Indian sugar plantations is a good idea in itself, but it is used so often that it appears to be a mere device to put the company in a bad light. Further evidence of the author’s antipathy toward the company is the repeated selection of negative excerpts from travel and consular accounts that, on the whole, treat the company favorably Despite frequent references to the “high” wages paid to Jamaican workers, Chomsky makes no effort to compare those wages with wage scales in the country in general. Chomsky’s views of the company’s efforts to fill workers’ educational, recreational, religious, and medical needs are essentially negative and lacking in context.
All in all, however, this is one of the best and most enlightening books in recent years on the banana industry in Central America.
