Banana Guatemala Honduras Costa Rica Panama

American republics of Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica, are now the commercial banana centers of the world. But the real homeland of the crop is completely around the globe from these points, in Southern Asia, most likely in the hot wet valleys of India, where Alexander the Great encountered the crop during his conquests and described it as a crop whose seed was even then completely sterile. Having underwritten numerous dynasties and civilizations of Asia and the Orient, the non-American banana, carried to the New World in 1516 by a Spanish missionary priest, now contributes to the national economies of about a third of all American republics.

The name "banana" is neither Asiatic nor American. It is taken from a Negro dialect once current along the Guinea Coast of Africa where the plant was reputedly carried via dried-root trade from India. That lowland India was botanical home of the banana is borne out by sculptures and friezes to be seen on the walls of the Stupa of Barhut, a Buddhist monument of lower India presumably built about 175 B.C. This is probably the oldest-known representation of the fruit. But references to bananas appear frequently in Chinese writings of the Tang dynasty which were contemporary with the Early Christian Era. Chinese physicians brewed medicines from the roots of the plant; the fruit was considered a precious food and tonic, and stalk fibers were used for weaving mats.

It is probable that by the beginning of the Christian Era, banana roots were a well-established commerce of the Polynesians, having been carried by primitive ocean craft from Malayan coasts and Indonesia throughout the South Sea Islands and even to the mainlands of northeast Australia. Thus the banana circled the equator and became perhaps the nearest universal fruit of tropical man.

In 1698 Thomas Gage, soldier of fortune, commented in his report, A New Survey of the West Indies: ". . . our chief care . . . was to look to our bananas . . . The fruit pleased us all exceedingly, judging it to be as good or better as any fruit in Spain. It is not gathered ripe from the trees; but being gathered green, it is hung up some days, and so ripens and grows yellow and mellow, and every bit as sweet as honey . . ."

Writing from Cairo, Egypt, in 1831, to his sister Sarah in England, the ever-cautious Disraeli said, "...the most delicious thing in the world is a banana."

A few decades later the journals of Livingstone and Stanley tell how for almost two years Stanley and the white men of his expedition lived largely on banana flour cooked into thin gruel. For centuries there has been voluminous testimony of the banana's importance as food for tropical man and beast. It is one of the few crops to become a staff of life for man and beast alike. Fed green to livestock, the banana approximates the nutritive worth of grass and grain since starch and mineral content of the unripened pulp compare with those of grain, while the green skins are a valuable source of chlorophyll. Livestock economy of many tropical lands is considerably dependent on bananas.

But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that business minds began to realize the possibilities of bananas as a food for peoples of temperate zones. Now that these possibilities are at last being realized, the banana awakens to new and momentous social and political significances.

For today the banana is the greatest of all export fruits, a premier American business card in international trade and the one American export crop whose volume and consumption range is rapidly growing during a decade of embattled nationalism. This is another paradox with yellow skin.

Not content with exploding numerous gospels of botany, transportation, and foreign trade or the bizarre feat of hoisting a once lowly agriculture to an international post in shipping, government, and social institutions, the unique banana now begins to devise a distinctive trade arithmetic.

The Spanish influence on Central American history

The Spanish influence on Central American history is none the less overwhelming. Central America is no younger child of Spain. No less a personage than Christopher Columbus himself discovered Honduras in 1502, sailed south along the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua (where he was not impressed by any friendliness in the Indians), and reached, finally, to the land that he called Costa Rica (literally "Rich Shore"). There, for the first time on this voyage, the Spaniards found gold--in the ornaments worn by the natives. Those beautifully wrought ornaments of Costa Rica are rare archeological treasures today, and, as Columbus himself later learned, they were treasures to the Indians then, for gold was no common metal there. But the sign was enough for the Spaniards, and the short-lived settlement of Costa Rica, headed by Bartholomew Columbus, was one of the first on the mainland of the continent.

But in that very time there was passing away in the north, in what is now Guatemala, one of the greatest barbaric civilizations which history has ever seen, that of the Mayas, a wealth and a civilization of which the Spaniards were as yet entirely ignorant. Superb cities, built of stone elaborately wrought, with a literature even today only partially deciphered, a science in many ways more accurate and advanced than that of, the Europe of that time, and a social organization which the governments that have followed under Spain and the independence have hardly excelled,--these were the characteristics of the great history which preceded the Spaniards.

The conquest of these Central American Indians by the Spaniards came nearly two decades later. Although little known, in comparison with the conquests of México and Perú as immortalized by Prescott's vivid narratives, it lacks none of the heroism, or the cruelty, or the bigotry, of those larger canvases. The march of Pedro de Alvarado's army, overland from México into Guatemala through jungles that are utterly trackless to this day, is another of the striking stories of superhuman endurance that mark the whole history of Spain in America.
The battles whose scenes we shall visit in the highlands of Guatemala have a legendary glory awful in its horror and superb in its daring, while the hazy tales of ruthless and easy conquest of tribes other than the Mayas and their highland allies, are virtually hidden in the as yet unscratched archæology of these countries, yet for that matter, neither the one nor the other seems less lost in dim tradition than are the events of the Spanish rule that followed in succeeding centuries.

Indeed, the background of the Central America of today sometimes seems like a dim romantic panorama, of prehistoric civilizations, rivalling Egypt and India, of Spanish conquerors running rivers red with the blood of Indian armies, of pirates treading the "Main" with dripping swords and leathern sacks of yellow gold, and, in more modern days, of chivalrous revolutions and burning idealisms, of slavery and the wealth of coffee, of colorful dictatorships and the golden trove of the banana trade. It is all part and parcel of a past of isolation in the very midst of the world. For three centuries Spain held the world at bay, and then for an even hundred years revolutions, politics and diplomacy have shut Central America away not only from Europe and Asia but from the United States as well..