The United Fruit Co.

When the trumpet sounded, it was all prepared on the earth, the Jehovah parcelled out the earth to Coca Cola, Inc., Anaconda, Ford Motors, and other entities: The Fruit Company, Inc. reserved for itself the most succulent, the central coast of my own land, the delicate waist of America. It rechristened its territories as the ’Banana Republics’ and over the sleeping dead, over the restless heroes who brought about the greatness, the liberty and the flags, it established the comic opera: abolished the independencies, presented crowns of Caesar, unsheathed envy, attracted the dictatorship of the flies, Trujillo flies, Tacho flies, Carias flies, Martines flies, Ubico flies, damp flies of modest blood and marmalade, drunken flies who zoom over the ordinary graves, circus flies, wise flies well trained in tyranny. Among the blood-thirsty flies the Fruit Company lands its ships, taking off the coffee and the fruit; the treasure of our submerged territories flow as though on plates into the ships. Meanwhile Indians are falling into the sugared chasms of the harbours, wrapped for burials in the mist of the dawn: a body rolls, a thing that has no name, a fallen cipher, a cluster of the dead fruit thrown down on the dump.