Bananas brought real capitalist relations to Costa Rica, permanently eroding the dominant ideology of the bourgeois coffee elite and their ‘harmonious, rural egalitarian’ idyll.
The banana industry operated under entirely different relations of production. Banana operations were largely foreign-owned, with most profits leaving the country, and with vast areas of plantation owned by a very wealthy few, who exploited a mass of ‘unfree’, ‘alienated’, often immigrant, wage-laborers, to make profit. A highly differentiated class structure of multi-national corporations vs an impoverished, racially-mixed proletariat was the norm here.
Bananas meant a dependence on foreign investment, reliance on U.S. rather than European markets, and the beginnings of a commercialized agro-industrial, import/export economy – dependent on the import of manufactured products, foodstuffs and raw materials, and therefore subject to the fluctuations of world markets - the consequences of which are only really becoming apparent in the 21st century.
Working conditions in the banana industry were also very different; workers generally lived in squalor in primitive encampments on the plantations; they were badly paid, had few rights and were subject to indiscriminate firings and wage reductions.
Plantations were simply abandoned once the lands they had exploited were exhausted, devastating whole communities who had become not only economically reliant but also dependent on the strategic services they provided – water, electricity, transport – which were cut off when they left.
Foreign control and exploitative relations eventually led to the fomentation of anti-imperialist sentiments amongst sections of the Liberal class and social conflict within the industry itself. 1888 saw the country’s first ever strike, when railroad workers protested, and several banana workers strikes followed between 1910 and 1934. Carlos Luís Falla, Costa Rica’s greatest literary figure, published his best known work, ‘Mamita Yunai’, describing the terrible conditions of plantation life at this time.
The social conflict, the arrival of Panama Disease infecting banana plants and a drop in market prices, led to the eventual decline of the industry after 1925.
However, by this time, the diversification of exports had come to include other products – sugar, cacao, hardwoods, cattle-ranching – consolidating capitalist relations in the region, and prompting extensive clearing and destruction of forest areas, thereby increasing class-differentiation; creating a substantial landless peasantry, a significant laboring class and the beginnings of what would become a new, dominant elite of self-made entrepreneurs.
In this way the banana industry, and the agro-capitalist relations it brought to Costa Rica prompted a challenge to the leyenda blanca in the form of a radicalized class consciousness; and provided the conditions for the country’s subsequent political and economic re-organization.
Bananas meant a dependence on foreign investment, reliance on U.S. rather than European markets, and the beginnings of a commercialized agro-industrial, import/export economy – dependent on the import of manufactured products, foodstuffs and raw materials, and therefore subject to the fluctuations of world markets - the consequences of which are only really becoming apparent in the 21st century.
Working conditions in the banana industry were also very different; workers generally lived in squalor in primitive encampments on the plantations; they were badly paid, had few rights and were subject to indiscriminate firings and wage reductions.
Plantations were simply abandoned once the lands they had exploited were exhausted, devastating whole communities who had become not only economically reliant but also dependent on the strategic services they provided – water, electricity, transport – which were cut off when they left.
Foreign control and exploitative relations eventually led to the fomentation of anti-imperialist sentiments amongst sections of the Liberal class and social conflict within the industry itself. 1888 saw the country’s first ever strike, when railroad workers protested, and several banana workers strikes followed between 1910 and 1934. Carlos Luís Falla, Costa Rica’s greatest literary figure, published his best known work, ‘Mamita Yunai’, describing the terrible conditions of plantation life at this time.
The social conflict, the arrival of Panama Disease infecting banana plants and a drop in market prices, led to the eventual decline of the industry after 1925.
However, by this time, the diversification of exports had come to include other products – sugar, cacao, hardwoods, cattle-ranching – consolidating capitalist relations in the region, and prompting extensive clearing and destruction of forest areas, thereby increasing class-differentiation; creating a substantial landless peasantry, a significant laboring class and the beginnings of what would become a new, dominant elite of self-made entrepreneurs.
In this way the banana industry, and the agro-capitalist relations it brought to Costa Rica prompted a challenge to the leyenda blanca in the form of a radicalized class consciousness; and provided the conditions for the country’s subsequent political and economic re-organization.
