United Fruit Company Postcards

One of my topical collections are United Fruit Company, the reason I stumbled back into stamp collecting. Although I haven't done much with it lately, I thought I would share these two United Fruit-postcards with you.

Found another one as well. One of the ships in the company's "Great White Fleet."

Yobo I find the United Fruit Company covers postcards interesting..they fit in with my Guatemala collecting !!

philb, happy you liked them. United Fruit has quite a history in Guatemala, and in the rest of the countries they operated within for that matter.

Yes, to this day all banana boats are white. I used to sit on the banks of the Panama Canal and tried to learn what the ship was carrying by how it looked. Have any cards from Panama?

smauggie, I might have on lying around somewhere. Just have to locate it.

Sounds like a great way of passing the time, sitting at the Panama Canal and looking at all the ships going to all the corners of the world.

i just went thumbing through my Guatemala covers found this one !

Yobo they have quite a history alright..and they thought Al Capone was bad ?

Great cover, philb.

United Fruit was very ruthless indeed. Especially at their peak before the Second World War.

How come they were bad? Did they abuse the fruit pickers or something?

More complex than I care to sort out at the moment, but this Wiki link helps to explain a lot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

By the way, United Fruit Co. is now known as Chiquita Brands (as in the bananas most of us buy at the grocery store.)

Nells250, there are several reasons United Fruit has a bad reputation. Some are the company's own doing, others are a combination of the company's actions and influences from the political realm they operated within.

The combination between the company's size in comparison to the countries it operated within and the vertical integration (full control of its product from planting to sale) model they preferred meant that they had a big impact on the economies they operated within. United Fruit built up company villages were they housed their employees (due to the plantations often being situated in remote places), built their own railroads to transport the bananas, had their own fleet of ships and a subsidiary that got the bananas to the sellers all over the United States and parts of Canada. Combine the impact and power this business model gave United Fruit with a ruthless behaviour in countries ruled by dictators, and you have the makings of a very bad reputation.

In addition they got themselves into bad situations several times. A few examples are the role they played in the toppling of Arbenz in Guatemala (how big their role was is debated), alleged involvement when the Colombian army opened fire on United Fruit workers in Santa Marta in 1928, the "banana war" in Honduras against Standard Fruit Company and Cuyamel Fruit Company.

Hope this answers your question, Nells250.

Imagine what the economies of Central and South America would be like if the ruling class educated the people instead of using them for cheap labor in their little fiefdoms !1