Why Uncle Sam coined banana republic cliche

When it is invoked to describe nations, banana republic conjures up a range of clichés and caricatured images of US-Central American and Caribbean diplomatic relations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Banana republics referred to countries led by dictators, oligarchs, and “strongmen” who ruled over indigenous and/or mixed-race peasants and managed economies dependent on agricultural exports, stereotypically coffee or bananas.

The labour force in these economic ventures in the Caribbean were usually descendants of enslaved people participating in anti-imperial struggles against Spanish colonialism.

US citizens, diplomats and military men who ventured into Latin America in the late 19th century brought with them visions of their country’s place in the world grounded in white supremacy and colonialism.

Drawn to the region’s abundant supply of agricultural products, mining, and natural resources, Americans viewed the region as a racially backward place ripe for exploitation.

From the outset, so-called banana republics were linked to racial and cultural legacies left by years of colonialism in Honduras, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and Panama.

Honduras, the first country to be branded a banana republic in 1904, denounced American involvement in the region’s economics and government as early as the 1850s.

In the 1890s, writer O. Henry went to Honduras to escape embezzlement charges. After his return to the US in 1904, he published a novel called Cabbages and Kings, set in a country meant to resemble Honduras called Anchuria that he labelled a “banana republic” because it had a shady government and an economy that depended on bananas.

Here is the first mention of the term, which occurs on page 147 of the novel: “In the Constitution of this small, maritime banana republic was a forgotten section that provided for the maintenance of a navy. This provision, with many wiser ones, had lain inert since the establishment of the republic. Anchuria had no navy and had no use for one. It was characteristic of Don Sabas, a man at once merry, learned, whimsical and audacious that he should have disturbed the dust of this musty and sleeping statute to increase the humour of the world by so much as a smile from his indulgent colleagues. With delightful mock seriousness, the Minister of War proposed the creation of a navy.”

The term he coined hung long enough to be absorbed into popular culture as a slang insult for, as Wiktionary puts it, “a small country, especially one in Central America or the West Indies, that is dependent on a single export commodity (traditionally bananas) and that has a corrupt, dictatorial government.” O. Henry’s book is classified as satire; it attempts to convince you that it is funny when a fruit firm has more control over a country than its government does.

By 1929, Honduras was the main exporter of bananas in the world. Enterprises owned by two US corporations, the United Fruit Company and the Standard Fruit Company, financed wars among Honduran elites to secure concessions to build railroads, develop banana plantation infrastructure, and obtain tax-free imports. O. Henry’s writings on Honduras served as a primer for Americans arriving after these wars.

As John Soluri has shown in “Banana Cultures”, marketing campaigns promoting the general consumption of bananas among US citizens at this time assumed O. Henry’s views about the countries where this commodity originated.

Beginning in 1930, the United Fruit Company dominated the banana republics. The company was headed by Sam “the Banana Man” Zemurray, who enjoyed close relations with the US State Department and the CIA. In 1954, Zemurray used the CIA to support a military coup against the president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, who had challenged Zemurray’s monopolies.

During this period, US diplomats appeared either as active agents of US corporations or as negligent facilitators of a neocolonial American empire. The US military served these corporate and national interests by providing “protection” to the economic interests of white US elites.

Until 1959, US diplomatic relations with these nations were framed by the imposition of imperialistic political and economic policies and hegemony, from the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, Dollar Diplomacy, and the Good Neighbour Policy in the 1930s and 40s.

After 1950, Good Neighbourliness succumbed to Cold war posturing between the US and the Soviet Union and their allies. Between the 1960s and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, US diplomacy often drew on the caricature of banana republics.

The origins and course of the Cuban Revolution, for example, were often caricatured as another example of a civil war conflict mired in banana republic politics and lacking democratic goals and issues of equity.

The US invasion of Panama in 1989, authorized by President George H. W. Bush, a former CIA chief, apprehended dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega.

In framing the invasion around Noriega’s cocaine trafficking and his status as a paid informant of the CIA, the government and media reinforced the banana republic narrative that had shaped US perception of the region for 80 years.

Stereotypes and parodies of the banana republic were common in travelogues, films, documentaries, newsreels, school textbooks, and mass-produced school slideshows from the 1950s to the 1980s.

These include Jacques Tourneur’s “Appointment in Honduras” (1953), and Woody Allen’s “Bananas” (1969). The stereotype even shows up in films that purport to be critical of the US intervention in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration, such as Alex Walker’s “Walker” (1987).

To add insult to injury, there is a safari clothing line company called Banana Republic (1978) in the US.

So, to parody the January 7 storming of the Capitol as the usual political culture of banana republics is to totally ignore the historical context of the cliché.

The banana republic trope was originally created to mask a diplomatic chauvinism committed to furthering narrow economic interests and empire building in Latin America.