Prima, c’era il giornalista Dan Koeppel (autore di “Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World”) convinto che la coltivazione della banana sia stato “lo yin e lo yang della cultura americana”. Ora, un giornalista economico, Peter Chapman, ha scritto un (altro) libro a metà tra storia e geopolitica su questo frutto: “Bananas!: How The United Fruit Company Shaped the World”. E lì sostiene che, ai fini dello sviluppo, la banana è stata una specie di petrolio per tutto il centramerica, naturalmente con una gestione del business abbastanza spregiudicata:
As the next century rolled on, buccaneering banana men pioneered such innovative business practices as propping up puppet heads of states throughout Latin America, keeping them in power through corporate largesse, and exploiting local workers, when not actually encouraging local governments to enslave or kill them. By building railroads, in exchange for land for plantations, United Fruit tightly entwined itself with the economies of many countries, and came to own huge swaths of Central America. Its reach was so extensive that it became known as “the Octopus”.
