SABRINA KRAMER – History 3072: History of Modern Latin America, Fall 2024

Throughout the Cold War, the fear of communism and the spread of it to the United States was a . When communism broke out in Latin America, places like Chile, Cuba, and El Salvador were major concerns for the United States. With it’s close proximity to the US, it was a top priority for President Ford to contain and protect democracy for Latin America which would ensure the future of the United States.

We can see these specific concerns of carrying out operations of such in Chile through this unclassified document from the National Security Archive. In this document, President Ford and Henry Kissinger are speaking to their peers about funds being appropriated to Chile political parties who are in favor of preserving democratic governance. There were some concerns about how the funds were being distributed and if they were going where they were supposed to in order to make strides towards tearing down the rise of communism in Chile.

Within Chile itself, we know that there were internal concerns that they were dealing with during the uprise of communism. In the reading, “Gender Policing, Homosexuality, and the New Patriarchy of the Cuban Revolution” by Lillian Guerra, it discusses the flaws within communism relating to different groups of people like women, homosexuals, and other groups of people who they saw posed a threat to communism. In the United States, it was actually believed the opposite. For example, people were engaging in things like “lavender marriages” in order to conceal their homosexuality, not only for societal norms but rather it was seen as a direct connection to communism if a family did not fit into this traditional nuclear American family. It was also believed that women were more likely to be communists in America as well. Finding these similarities of concerns but for different reasons between communist and fearful of communist countries shows the internal struggles of either side— Cuba or the United States.

Again, this unclassified document that displays the direct concern over Cuba becoming communist and their careful language around it, acknowledges the underlying aspects of communism both in the Unites states and places like Cuba.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Doc6-Chile-CIA-Scandal-40-Committee_0.pdf

Source: Tulane University Howard-Tilton Memorial Library. Early Images of Latin America Collection. “Cutting Bananas”. Box 10, Album 12, Costa Rica_05

The image above is from 19th century Costa Rica, where there are workers harvesting bananas, most likely, on a hacienda.

From the reading, Accounting for Taste, by John Soluri, many issues surrounding the banana industry during this time are revealed. The author discusses three main facets of the banana trade: export, mass markets, and disease. I would like to further discuss mass markets to gain a deeper understanding of the photo I have chosen.

As we know from class, haciendas are a place where people work in a similar fashion to “Sharecropping”. So the workers depicted are probably contributing to their hacienda and working for an owner of a property taking part in the mass market of bananas being shipped off to the United States of America. According to, John Soluri, bananas were still a novelty in the US in the 19th century until World War I.

The company Gos Michel fruit made up most of the imports of bananas to the United States. Concepts of things like a “banana tax” were proposed but otherwise shot down because bananas were considered the “poor man’s fruit”. This was the beginning of the mass consumption and market of the bananas. With high demand comes with the need of supply. Therefore, companies were pouring money into ways to make production, harvesting, and transport faster and more efficient in order to fulfill the demand.

In the picture above, “Cutting Bananas” , is from the 1890’s. So this is before many of these new efficiencies were in place. This photo represents the raw and hard work that went into harvesting bananas in Costa Rica which were apart of the beginning of this banana boom in the US.