The Fish That Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen

Author:Rich Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

15

Los Pericos

Word of Zemurray’s takeover went through the isthmus like a jungle fire. In the tin-roof cantinas of Tela and Puerto Cortés, where the men strummed Spanish guitars and the young women cried because they’d been rejected in love, the field hands and the plantation managers raised their glasses of fermented cane to drink one for the Gringo. The return of Zemurray seemed a godsend. For years, the employees of United Fruit had sent their reports to Boston and for years those reports had been rejected or ignored. The company had been governed by missive, edicts issued by a king as he soaked in his tub: your request for $10,000 for a ditch has been denied for reasons sufficient to Boston. As a result, many of the company’s decisions seemed irrelevant or just plain wrong. In Zemurray, the men in the compounds and banana towns recognized one of their own, the hombre who crossed the country on a mule. United Fruit had not had such a leader since the passing of Minor Keith.

Zemurray wanted to reassure the workers from the start, change their mood by showing them things would be different. There is the substance of what you do, then there is the style, the subtext of your story told not in words but in how you go about your business. Unlike other incoming chiefs—here I’m thinking of CEOs who take over bureaucracy-heavy companies in trouble—Zemurray did not begin his work at company headquarters. He did not spend his first days with accountants, nor coop himself up with reports, nor shout his head off at meetings. He went out on the road, announcing straightaway that he would begin his tenure with a six-week tour of the banana lands. He wanted to visit every country where United Fruit owned plantations, ports, railroads. He wanted to talk to the men in the fields. He wanted to see for himself.

He boarded a ship at Thalia Street Wharf, in New Orleans, say, where the city is fog shrouded and blue with rain. It was his first trip to the isthmus in some time. He had left as an ambitious player who had cashed in his chips. He was returning as the man who had won the casino itself, who, in the way of Kublai Khan, possessed everything as far as the eye could see. United Fruit had over a million acres under cultivation, owned hospitals and schools, thousands of miles of highway and railroad, piers, warehouses. Zemurray visited as much of it as possible, stopping in Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, Cuba. He walked in the heat, stood in the fields, strolled through the towns, drank in the bars, laughed with the vaqueros. His manner was as informal as can be, just another banana man in mud-caked boots and khaki pants, tall and friendly, standing in the shade of the great fronds, watching the cutters cut and the loaders load, examining the straw-filled boxcars, lingering in the dives where men got

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.