When Sam emigrated from Russia in 1891, he was tall, intelligent, ambitious and poor. Within a few years, he’d seen his first banana, and that made all the difference. By 1899, Sam was a familiar figure on wharves in Mobile and New Orleans, where he bought the freckled bananas other traders dumped as too ripe. For Zemurray, a huge man who could swear in five languages, hustle was the name of the game. Who says you can’t get ‘em to market in time? Schmucks!
When Sam died in the grandest house in New Orleans in 1961, he was among the most powerful men in the country, the longtime head of United Fruit, the global behemoth that ruled in Central and South America for 50 years. In between, he lived and fought in cities and jungles, cl
eared fields, planted stems, smuggled weapons, fomented revolutions, advised presidents, built towns. When thwarted by the government of Honduras in 1911, he recruited a mercenary army in the dives of New Orleans’ French Quarter and went to war, replacing the Honduran president with one more to his liking. United Fruit repeated the trick in Guatemala in 1954, this time working with the CIA.
via Salon [book review of The Fish That Ate The Whale by Rich Cohen]
No comments:
Post a Comment