{"id":207115,"date":"2022-03-21T12:01:28","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T12:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=207115"},"modified":"2022-03-15T08:56:07","modified_gmt":"2022-03-15T08:56:07","slug":"the-united-fruit-co","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2022\/03\/the-united-fruit-co\/","title":{"rendered":"The United Fruit Co."},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Poetry\">When the trumpets had sounded and all<br \/>\nwas in readiness on the face of the earth,<br \/>\nJehovah divided his universe:<br \/>\nAnaconda, Ford Motors,<br \/>\nCoca-Cola Inc., and similar entities:<br \/>\nthe most succulent item of all,<br \/>\nThe United Fruit Company Incorporated<br \/>\nreserved for itself: the heartland<br \/>\nand coasts of my country,<br \/>\nthe delectable waist of America.<br \/>\nThey rechristened their properties:<br \/>\nthe \u201cBanana Republics\u201d\u2014<br \/>\nand over the languishing dead,<br \/>\nthe uneasy repose of the heroes<br \/>\nwho harried that greatness,<br \/>\ntheir flags and their freedoms,<br \/>\nthey established an <i>\u00f3pera bouffe<\/i>:<br \/>\nthey ravished all enterprise,<br \/>\nawarded the laurels like Caesars,<br \/>\nunleashed all the covetous, and contrived<br \/>\nthe tyrannical Reign of the Flies\u2014<br \/>\nTrujillo the fly, and Tacho the fly,<br \/>\nthe flies called Car\u00edas, Mart\u00ednez,<br \/>\nUbico\u2014all of them flies, flies<br \/>\ndank with the blood of their marmalade<br \/>\nvassalage, flies buzzing drunkenly<br \/>\non the populous middens:<br \/>\nthe fly-circus fly and the scholarly<br \/>\nkind, case-hardened in tyranny.<br \/>\nThen in the bloody domain of the flies<br \/>\nThe United Fruit Company Incorporated<br \/>\nsailed off with a booty of coffee and fruits<br \/>\nbrimming its cargo boats, gliding<br \/>\nlike trays with the spoils<br \/>\nof our drowning dominions.<\/p>\n<p class=\"Poetry\">And all the while, somewhere, in the sugary<br \/>\nhells of our seaports,<br \/>\nsmothered by gases, an Indian<br \/>\nfell in the morning:<br \/>\na body spun off, an anonymous<br \/>\nchattel, some numeral tumbling,<br \/>\na branch with its death running out of it<br \/>\nin the vat of the carrion, fruit laden and foul.<\/p>\n<p>_____________________________________________<\/p>\n<p>This poem was published in <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.14452\/MR-018-04-1966-08_4\"  target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">volume 18, number 4<\/a>, of <i>Monthly Review<\/i> (September 1966), from <i>Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda<\/i>, trans. Ben Belitt (Grove Press, 1961).<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Pablo-Neruda-Annemarie-Heinrich-1967.jpeg\" ><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-207116\" src=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Pablo-Neruda-Annemarie-Heinrich-1967-150x150.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Pablo-Neruda-Annemarie-Heinrich-1967-150x150.jpeg 150w, https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/Pablo-Neruda-Annemarie-Heinrich-1967.jpeg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 100px) 100vw, 100px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>Ricardo Eli\u00e9cer Neftal\u00ed Reyes Basoalto, better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda, was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971<\/em>. <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pablo_Neruda\" >Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the trumpets had sounded and all<br \/>\nwas in readiness on the face of the earth,<br \/>\nJehovah divided his universe:<br \/>\nAnaconda, Ford Motors,<br \/>\nCoca-Cola Inc., and similar entities<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":207116,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[182],"tags":[1177,541,1077,2815,868],"class_list":["post-207115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-poetry-format","tag-inspirational","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-nobel-literature-prize","tag-pablo-neruda","tag-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207115","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=207115"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207115\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207115"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207115"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207115"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}